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

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Answer 1

Single quotes can be very slightly faster than double quotes because the lexer doesn't have to check for #{} interpolation markers. Depending on implementation, etc. Note that this is a parse-time cost, not a run-time cost.

That said, the actual question was whether using double quoted strings "decreases performance in any meaningful way", to which the answer is a decisive "no". The difference in performance is so incredibly small that it is completely insignificant compared to any real performance concerns. Don't waste your time.

Actual interpolation is a different story, of course. 'foo' will be almost exactly 1 second faster than "#{sleep 1; nil}foo".