[ruby-core:99859] [Ruby master Feature#16989] Sets: need ♥️

[matz@ruby.or.jp]

Issue #16989 has been updated by matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto).


I agree with some of your proposals (#16990, #16991, #16993, #16995). I want @knu to work on this. If I missed something, he will tell us.

I strongly disagree with #16994. There's no evidence we need frozen sets of strings or symbols that much. Even if we do, I think frozen arrays should come first.

I weakly disagree with #16992. Currently set orders are determined by the internal hash. We may change the implementation in the future to improve performance or memory overhead. Fixing the order could possibly restrict the future implementation choice.

Matz.


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Feature #16989: Sets: need ♥️
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16989#change-87386

* Author: marcandre (Marc-Andre Lafortune)
* Status: Assigned
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: knu (Akinori MUSHA)
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I am opening a series of feature requests on `Set`, all of them based on this usecase.

The main usecase I have in mind is my recent experience with `RuboCop`. I noticed a big number of frozen arrays being used only to later call `include?` on them. This is `O(n)` instead of `O(1)`.

Trying to convert them to `Set`s causes major compatibility issues, as well as very frustrating situations and some cases that would make them much less efficient.

Because of these incompatibilities, `RuboCop` is in the process of using a custom class based on `Array` with optimized `include?` and `===`. `RuboCop` runs multiple checks on Ruby code. Those checks are called cops. `RuboCop` performance is (IMO) pretty bad and some cops  currently are in `O(n^2)` where n is the size of the code being inspected. Even given these extremely inefficient cops, optimizing the 100+ such arrays (most of which are quite small btw) gave a 5% speed boost.

RuboCop PRs for reference: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop-ast/pull/29
https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/pull/8133

My experience tells me that there are many other opportunities to use `Set`s that are missed because `Set`s are not builtin, not known enough and have no shorthand notation.

In this issue I'd like to concentrate the discussion on the following request: `Set`s should be core objects, in the same way that `Complex` were not and are now. Some of the upcoming feature requests would be easier (or only possible) to implement were `Set`s builtin.



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