From: "Student (Nathan Zook)" Date: 2013-02-15T17:05:14+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:52283] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7791] Let symbols be garbage collected Issue #7791 has been updated by Student (Nathan Zook). My definition of complicating the life of the core team is undertaking projects that are likely to cause bugs. That also complicates the life of everyone using Ruby. Garbage collection only secures one part of the to_sym problem, that of the memory leak. It does nothing to address detainting. It does nothing to address random symbol creation. Symbol[] provides a facility that can be used to guarantee this. I can think of no improvement that GCing Symbols does that can not be matched by simply refusing to intern tainted strings. Of course, that would expose a lot of brain-dead code. It would also break a lot of acceptable code that is only acceptable because of the details of the environment in which it runs. As for the proposal here, I have already pointed out, it is not enough to use the two different ways that symbols are created to partition the set of symbols for GC purposes. You don't want to GC any method names of linked classes, and it doesn't matter how they were first accessed. If the idea is to limit memory leakage, you DO want to GC method names of classes which are delinked. Which makes a complete hash of the proposal to do a partial GC. But a full GC destroys many of the advantages of having symbols in the first place. Furthermore, it is going to impact performance in hard-to-predict ways. Security is not optional. But step 1 of security is to be bug free. That means simple implementations where possible. And Symbol[] provides a facility that addresses the memory leak completely without affecting core behaviour. What it doesn't do is correct a lot of brain-dead behaviour favoured by the users of some web frameworks (which, in their defence, is actually encouraged by the developers of these frameworks). I don't think it is the responsibility of the core team to try to protect people from being idiots. ---------------------------------------- Feature #7791: Let symbols be garbage collected https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7791#change-36310 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/