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Feature #18035

open

Introduce general model/semantic for immutability.

Added by ioquatix (Samuel Williams) over 2 years ago. Updated 23 days ago.

Status:
Open
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:104560]

Description

It would be good to establish some rules around mutability, immutability, frozen, and deep frozen in Ruby.

I see time and time again, incorrect assumptions about how this works in production code. Constants that aren't really constant, people using #freeze incorrectly, etc.

I don't have any particular preference but:

  • We should establish consistent patterns where possible, e.g.
    • Objects created by new are mutable.
    • Objects created by literal are immutable.

We have problems with how freeze works on composite data types, e.g. Hash#freeze does not impact children keys/values, same for Array. Do we need to introduce freeze(true) or #deep_freeze or some other method?

Because of this, frozen does not necessarily correspond to immutable. This is an issue which causes real world problems.

I also propose to codify this where possible, in terms of "this class of object is immutable" should be enforced by the language/runtime, e.g.

module Immutable
  def new(...)
    super.freeze
  end
end

class MyImmutableObject
  extend Immutable

  def initialize(x)
    @x = x
  end
  
  def freeze
    return self if frozen?
    
    @x.freeze
    
    super
  end
end

o = MyImmutableObject.new([1, 2, 3])
puts o.frozen?

Finally, this area has an impact to thread and fiber safe programming, so it is becoming more relevant and I believe that the current approach which is rather adhoc is insufficient.

I know that it's non-trivial to retrofit existing code, but maybe it can be done via magic comment, etc, which we already did for frozen string literals.

Proposed PR: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/4879

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