[ruby-core:95002] [Ruby master Bug#16121] Stop making a redundant hash copy in Hash#dup

[ko1@atdot.net]

Issue #16121 has been updated by ko1 (Koichi Sasada).


I found that

> `    rb_define_method(rb_cArray, "initialize_copy", rb_ary_replace, 1);`

`Array#initialize_copy` == `Array#replace`. Can we use same technique?

----------------------------------------
Bug #16121: Stop making a redundant hash copy in Hash#dup
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16121#change-81630

* Author: dylants (Dylan Thacker-Smith)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: ko1 (Koichi Sasada)
* Target version: 
* ruby -v: ruby 2.7.0dev (2019-08-23T16:41:09Z master b38ab0a3a9) [x86_64-darwin18]
* Backport: 2.5: UNKNOWN, 2.6: UNKNOWN
----------------------------------------
## Problem

I noticed while profiling object allocations that Hash#dup was allocating 2 objects instead of only 1 as expected.  I looked for alternatives for comparison and found that `Hash[hash]` created a copy with only a single object allocation and seemed to be more than twice as fast.  Reading the source code revealed the difference was that Hash#dup creates a copy of the Hash, then rehashes the copy.   However, rehashing is done by making a copy of the hash, so the first copy before rehashing was unnecessary.

## Solution

I changed the code to just use rehashing to make the copy of the hash to improve performance while also preserving the existing behaviour.

## Benchmark

```ruby
require 'benchmark'

N = 100000

def report(x, name)
  x.report(name) do
    N.times do
      yield
    end
  end
end

hashes = {
  small_hash: { a: 1 },
  larger_hash: 20.times.map { |i| [('a'.ord + i).chr.to_sym, i] }.to_h
}

Benchmark.bmbm do |x|
  hashes.each do |name, hash|
    report(x, "#{name}.dup") do
      hash.dup
    end
  end
end
```

results on master

```
                      user     system      total        real
small_hash.dup    0.401350   0.001638   0.402988 (  0.404608)
larger_hash.dup   7.218548   0.433616   7.652164 (  7.695990)
```

results with the attached patch

```
                      user     system      total        real
small_hash.dup    0.336733   0.002425   0.339158 (  0.341760)
larger_hash.dup   6.617343   0.398407   7.015750 (  7.070282)
```

---Files--------------------------------
0001-Remove-redundant-Check_Type-after-to_hash.diff.txt (624 Bytes)
0002-Fix-freeing-and-clearing-destination-hash-in-Hash.diff.txt (1.57 KB)
0003-Remove-dead-code-paths-in-rb_hash_initialize_copy.diff.txt (1.12 KB)
0004-Stop-making-a-redundant-hash-copy-in-Hash-dup.diff.txt (1.35 KB)


-- 
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/