Ruby immutable strings
All string literals becoming immutable in Ruby 3.
For now starting with Ruby 2.3, if you add the magic comment
# frozen_string_literal: true to the file, the string literal for greeting is then automatically frozen (meaning it can’t be modified). This means that if name is present and we try to personalize the greeting, a runtime error will be raised.
Also you can force it by command line argument
ruby –enable-frozen-string-literal source_code.rb
or
ruby –enable-frozen-string-literal-debug source_code.rb
This includes those created using double quotes (“), single quotes (‘), or the special forms %Q and %q.
What for?
-
Performance
Since Ruby 2.1, frozen strings have avoided duplicate object allocation by ensuring that identical frozen strings always refer to the same object in memory. -
Error-prone usage protection
It should protect the code from non-intentional changing of strings constant by design.
What if we do need to modify the string?
In case we do need to update the string defined frozen we just have to duplicate it.
new_string = frozen_string.dup.upcase