Ruby Garbage Collection Force

This post focuses on the latest released version of cruby which is 2 7.

Ruby garbage collection force. You can write tons of ruby code and never give a second thought to the fact that under the covers ruby is doing a bang up job of allocating and freeing memory for your code to use. Ruby now garbage collects dynamically generated symbols so this vulnerability isn t an issue in the latest versions of ruby but older versions are common. Schneeman has some other examples of this vulnerability in his post about symbol garbage collection in ruby 2 2. How does garbage collection work in ruby.

The garbage collection has undergone a number of changes since ruby 2 was released in 2013. The json gem suffered from this vulnerability before ruby 2 0 0 and mr. Conversely speaking if the memory is allocated without following a certain procedure it won t be taken care of. For instance the following function will cause a memory leak even if ruby is running.

Ruby like most other modern high level programming languages doesn t force you to manage memory this feature is called garbage collection or gc and you get it for free in ruby. Tuning approaches lourens wrote this on feb 20th 2015 9 19 am mri maintainers have put a tremendous amount of work into this is the den a publication crafted by the friendly cubs at bear metal. Generational garbage collection was introduced in ruby 2 1. To preserve backward compatibility with old c extensions ruby.

Ruby s garbage collection is only concerned with ruby objects.