Is there a performance gain in using single quotes vs double quotes in ruby?

Question

Do you know if using double quotes instead of single quotes in ruby decreases performance in any meaningful way in ruby 1.8 and 1.9.

so if I type

qu         


        

Answer 1

No one happened to measure concatenation vs interpolation though:

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i686-darwin9.6.2]
$ cat benchmark_quotes.rb
require 'benchmark'
n = 1000000
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report("assign single") { n.times do; c = 'a string'; end}
  x.report("assign double") { n.times do; c = "a string"; end}
  x.report("assign interp") { n.times do; c = "a string #{'b string'}"; end}
  x.report("concat single") { n.times do; 'a string ' + 'b string'; end}
  x.report("concat double") { n.times do; "a string " + "b string"; end}
end

$ ruby -w benchmark_quotes.rb 
      user     system      total        real
assign single  2.600000   1.060000   3.660000 (  3.720909)
assign double  2.590000   1.050000   3.640000 (  3.675082)
assign interp  2.620000   1.050000   3.670000 (  3.704218)
concat single  3.760000   1.080000   4.840000 (  4.888394)
concat double  3.700000   1.070000   4.770000 (  4.818794)

Specifically, note assign interp = 2.62 vs concat single = 3.76. As icing on the cake, I also find interpolation to be more readable than 'a' + var + 'b' especially with regard to spaces.