Optimize Your Iterators
To a Ruby newcomer, Ruby iterators typically look like a convenient syntax for loops. In fact, iterators are such a good abstraction that even seasoned developers often forget that they really are nothing more than methods of Array and Hash classes with a block argument.
However, keeping this in mind is important for performance. We talked in Modify Arrays and Hashes in Place about the importance of in-place operations on hashes and arrays. But that’s not the end of the story.
Because a Ruby iterator is a function of an object (Array, Range, Hash, etc.), it has two characteristics that affect performance:
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Ruby GC will not garbage collect the object you’re iterating before the iterator is finished. This means that ...
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