February 2011
1 post
ruby String += considered harmful
In real code, we found a very, very slow loop. Changing two characters:
+= is about 100 seconds. << is around 1/3 of a second.
Using += on a string creates a copy and then discards the original, while << allows the ruby interpreter to intelligently resize the buffer.
The only gotcha is that << will mutate your string object, which means that it’s not safe to use on a...
