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Feature #16035

closed

Allow non-finalizable objects such as Integer, static Symbol etc in ObjectSpace::WeakMap

Added by byroot (Jean Boussier) over 4 years ago. Updated over 2 years ago.

Status:
Closed
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:94101]

Description

This goes one step farther than what @nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada) did in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/13498

With this patch, special objects such as static symbols, integers, etc can be used as either key or values inside WeakMap. They simply don't have a finalizer defined on them.

This is useful if you need to deduplicate value objects, e.g. some minimal use case:

class Money
  REGISTRY = ObjectSpace::WeakMap.new
  private_constant :REGISTRY

  def self.new(amount)
    REGISTRY[amount] ||= super.freeze
  end

  def initialize(amount)
    @amount = amount
  end
end

if Money.new(42).eql?(Money.new(42))
  puts "Same instance"
else
  puts "Different instances"
end

This is a very simple example, but more complex examples can create use a dynamically created symbol as deduplication key, etc.

It also removes one weirdness introduced in the mentioned patch:

wmap = ObjectSpace::WeakMap.new
wmap["foo".to_sym] = Object.new # works fine with dynamic symbols
wmap[:bar] = Object.new # cannot define finalizer for Symbol (ArgumentError)

Proposed patch: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2313

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