Don’t you Struct.new(…).new(…)

As I just happened upon it again, I gotta take a moment to talk about one my most despised ruby code patterns: Struct.new(...).new – ever since I happened upon it for the first time.

Struct.new?

Struct.new is a convenient way to create a class with accessors:

2.2.2 :001 > Extend = Struct.new(:start, :length)
 => Extend 
2.2.2 :002 > instance = Extend.new(10, 20)
 => #<struct Extend start=10, length=20> 
2.2.2 :003 > instance.start
 => 10 
2.2.2 :004 > instance.length
 => 20

That’s neat, isn’t it? It is, but like much of Ruby’s power it needs to be wielded with caution.

Where Struct.new goes wrong – the second new

When you do Struct.new you create an anonymous class, another new on it creates an instance of that class. Therefore, Struct.new(...).new(...) creates an anonymous class and creates an instance of it at the same time. This is bad as we create a whole class to create only one instance of it! That is a capital waste.

As a one-off use it might be okay, for instance when you put it in a constant. The sad part is, that this is not the only case I’ve seen it used. As in the first case where I encountered it, I see it used inside of code that is invoked frequently. Some sort of hot loop with calculations where more than one value is needed to represent some result of the calculation. Here programmers sometimes seem to reach for Struct.new(...).new(...).

Why is that bad?

Well it incurs an unnecessary overhead, creating the class every time is unnecessary. Not only that, as far as I understand it also creates new independent entries in the method cache. For JITed implementations (like JRuby) the methods would also be JITed independently. And it gets in the way of profiling, as you see lots of anonymous classes with only 1 to 10 method calls each.

But how bad is that performance hit? I wrote a little benchmark where an instance is created with 2 values and then those 2 values are read one time each. Once with Struct.new(...).new(...), once where the Struct.new(...) is saved in an intermediary constant. For fun and learning I threw in a similar usage with Array and Hash.

Benchmark.ips do |bm|
  bm.report "Struct.new(...).new" do
    value = Struct.new(:start, :end).new(10, 20)
    value.start
    value.end
  end

  SavedStruct = Struct.new(:start, :end)
  bm.report "SavedStruct.new" do
    value = SavedStruct.new(10, 20)
    value.start
    value.end
  end

  bm.report "2 element array" do
    value = [10, 20]
    value.first
    value.last
  end

  bm.report "Hash with 2 keys" do
    value = {start: 10, end: 20}
    value[:start]
    value[:end]
  end

  bm.compare!
end

I ran those benchmarks with CRuby 2.3. And the results, well I was surprised how huge the impact really is. The “new-new” implementation is over 33 times slower than the SavedStruct equivalent. And over 60 times slower than the fastest solution (Array), although that’s also not my preferred solution.

Struct.new(...).new    137.801k (± 3.0%) i/s -    694.375k
SavedStruct.new      4.592M (± 1.7%) i/s -     22.968M
2 element array      7.465M (± 1.4%) i/s -     37.463M
Hash with 2 keys      2.666M (± 1.6%) i/s -     13.418M
Comparison:
2 element array:  7464662.6 i/s
SavedStruct.new:  4592490.5 i/s - 1.63x slower
Hash with 2 keys:  2665601.5 i/s - 2.80x slower
Struct.new(...).new:   137801.1 i/s - 54.17x slower

Benchmark in iterations per second (higher is better)

But that’s not all…

This is not just about performance, though. When people take this “shortcut” they also circumvent one of the hardest problems in programming – Naming. What is that Struct with those values? Do they have any connection at all or were they just smashed together because it seemed convenient at the time. What’s missing is the identification of the core concept that these values represent. Anything that says that this is more than a clump of data with these two values, that performs very poorly.

So, please avoid using Struct.new(...).new(...) – use a better alternative. Don’t recreate a class over and over – give it a name, put it into a constant and enjoy a better understanding of the concepts and increased performance.

Don’t use the constructor before initialize is defined

Problem

If for some reason, most likely convenience, you want to have a constant containing an instance of an object in your class you have to pay attention to where you define this constant. An example might be that instead of City.new(10, 5) you would want to refer to it as the constant CITY_A.

(Please be aware that I adjusted the example a bit since I didn’t want to give away information about the ThoughtWorks coding test, it made more sense in its original application but just run with it.)

Fair enough so let’s give it a shot:

class City

CITY_A = City.new 10, 5

def initialize x, y
@x = x
@y = y
end

# rest of the class omitted

end

Now awkwardly enough when we try to let ruby interpret this code we get the following error (the error looks different depending on your interpreter, this is Ruby 1.9.3 roughly the same happens with JRuby and Rubinius):

city.rb:3:in `initialize': wrong number of arguments(2 for 0) (ArgumentError)
from city.rb:3:in `new'
from city.rb:3:in `<class:City>'
from city.rb:1:in `<main>'

But we have an initialize method and it takes 2 arguments! So why does the Ruby interpreter claim that it doesn’t take arguments at all?

Solution

So what’s wrong? Well we have to know how the ruby interpreter works. It starts at the top of the class and there it doesn’t yet know that we have an all new initialize method, taking 2 parameters. So fixing this is quite easy, here is the fixed class:

class City

def initialize x, y
@x = x
@y = y
end

CITY_A = City.new 10, 5

# rest of the class omitted

end

As you can see the constant declaration was moved beneath the declaration of the initialize method. While I prefer to define constants at the very top of my classes, this is the only method (known to me) to make this code work.

On a side note, this is a simplified example my actual use for class instances in a constant was a bit more complex and an adjusted version may be seen in my next blog post.