What’s << Got To Do With It

Strings and Shovels! Strings and Shovels!

Now, back to being serious 🙂 If you’d like to concatenate a string in Ruby, there are a few ways of doing that, mainly:

a = "foo" # assign a variable

a += "bar" # => "foobar"

a << bar" # => "foobar"

While both the “+=” and the “<<” (shovel) methods return the same results, there is actually a pretty important difference between them.

When you assign a variable in Ruby and other object-oriented programming languages, that object gets an object id, which is the location of that object in memory:

b = "bar" #assign a variable

b.object_id # => 70120269506600
ObjectSpace._id2ref(70120269506600) # => "bar"

Now, let’s see what happens with the object id when you concatenate a string using the “+=” method:

a = "foo"
a.object_id # => 70184094352800

b = "bar"
b.object_id # => 70184090023880

a += b # => "foobar"

a.object_id # => 70184082143020
a # => "foobar"
ObjectSpace._id2ref(70184094352800) # => "foo"

As you can see, when you use the “+=” method, the new value “foobar” creates a new object in memory. The original value “foo” is still stored in memory as well, but is no longer assigned to the variable “a”.

Now, the shovel method:

a = "foo"
a.object_id # => 70128708494400

b = "bar"
b.object_id # => 70128700542040

a << b # => "foobar"

a.object_id # => 70128708494400
a # => "foobar"
ObjectSpace._id2ref(70128708494400) # => "foobar"

As you see, with the shovel (<<) method, the original object “foo” is modified to “foobar” and no new object is created.

So why is this important?

When you are running a program with millions of users, the creation of new objects in memory using the “+=” method will significantly slow down your program.