---
title: "Ruby 3 adds Symbol#name"
description:
  "Ruby 3 adds an instance method 'name' to a Symbol class. Check what the
  'name' method does and why it was introduced"
canonical_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/ruby-3-adds-symbol-name"
markdown_url: "https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/ruby-3-adds-symbol-name.md"
---

# Ruby 3 adds Symbol#name

Ruby 3 adds an instance method 'name' to a Symbol class. Check what the 'name'
method does and why it was introduced

- Author: Datt Dongare
- Published: October 12, 2020
- Categories: Ruby, Ruby 3

All are excited about what `Ruby 3.0` has to offer to the Ruby developers. There
is already a lot of buzz that the feature set of `Ruby 3.0` will change the
perspective of developers how they look at `Ruby`.

One of the important aspects of `Ruby 3.0` is optimization. The part of that
optimization is the introduction of `name` method for `Symbol`. In this blog, we
will take a look at what `name` method of class `Symbol` does and why it was
introduced. The new `name` method is introduced on `Symbol` to simply convert a
symbol into a string. `Symbol#name` returns a string. Let's see how it works.

```ruby

irb(main):001:0> :simba.name
=> 'simba'
irb(main):002:0> :simba.name.class
=> String
irb(main):003:0> :simba.name === :simba.name
=> true

```

Wait what? Don't we have `to_s` to convert a symbol into a string. Most of us
have used `to_s` method on a `Symbol`. The `to_s` method returns a `String`
object and we can simply use it. But why `name`?

Using `to_s` is okay in most cases. But the problem with `to_s` is that it
creates a new `String` object every time we call it on a symbol. We can verify
this in `irb`.

```ruby

irb(main):023:0> :simba.to_s.object_id
=> 260
irb(main):024:0> :simba.to_s.object_id
=> 280

```

Creating a new object for every `symbol` to a `string` conversion allocates new
memory which increases overhead. The light was thrown on this issue by
[schneems (Richard Schneeman)](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/users/6346) in a talk
at RubyConf Thailand where he showed how `Symbol#to_s` allocation causes
significant overhead in `ActiveRecord`. This inspired `Ruby` community to have a
new method `name` on `Symbol` which returns a `frozen string` object. This
reduces the string allocations dramatically which results in reducing overhead.

```ruby

irb(main):001:0> :simba.name.frozen?
=> true
irb(main):002:0> :simba.name.object_id
=> 200
irb(main):003:0> :simba.name.object_id
=> 200

```

The reason to bring this feature was that most of the times we want a simple
string representation for displaying purpose or to interpolate into another
string. The result of `to_s` is rarely mutated directly. By introducing this
method we save a lot of objects which helps in optimization. Now we know the
benefits of `name`, we should prefer using `name` over `to_s` when we don't want
to mutate a string.

For more information on discussion, official documentation, please head on to
[Feature #16150](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16150) discussion,
[Pull request](https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/3514) and
[Ruby 3.0 official release preview](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2020/09/25/ruby-3-0-0-preview1-released/).

## Links

- [Human page](https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/ruby-3-adds-symbol-name)