From: "Student (Nathan Zook)" Date: 2013-02-15T08:57:31+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:52268] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7791] Let symbols be garbage collected Issue #7791 has been updated by Student (Nathan Zook). It seems to me that the motivation behind this proposal is to allow the interning of untrusted data to not affect the system. It seems to me that the proposal to garbage collect some symbols is complicated, and as such, likely to generate bugs. Perhaps my proposal #7854 addresses the problem in a way that is less likely to complicate the life of the ruby core team & ruby users. ---------------------------------------- Feature #7791: Let symbols be garbage collected https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7791#change-36298 Author: rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas) Status: Feedback Priority: Normal Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto) Category: core Target version: next minor Lots of Denial-of-Service security vulnerabilities exploited in Ruby programs rely on symbols not being collected by garbage collector. Ideally I'd prefer symbols and strings to behave exactly the same being just alternate ways of writing strings but I'll let this to another ticket. This one simply asks for symbols to be allowed to be garbage collected when low on memory. Maybe one could set up some up-limit memory constraints dedicated to storing symbols. That way, the most accessed symbols would remain in that memory region and the least used ones would be reclaimed when the memory for symbols is over and a new symbol is created. Or you could just allow symbols to be garbage collected any time. Any reasons why this would be a bad idea? Any performance benchmark demonstrating how using symbols instead of strings would make a real-world software perform much better? Currently I only see symbols slowing down processing because people don't want to worry about it and will often use something like ActiveSupport Hash#with_indifferent_access or some other method to convert a string to symbol or vice versa... -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/