Arnab's Universe

This was written way before StackOverflow launched, and certainly much before it became popular. Those were the days when programmers had find out answers themselves ;) This has since been asked and answered on StackOverflow.

I have had this question about the difference between Ruby’s clone and dup method multiple times now. And I have always had this fuzzy feeling that “they are almost the same thing”. Today my colleague asked it again and I decided to dig it out. Here’s what Ruby API docs say about them:

Object#clone

Produces a shallow copy of obj – the instance variables of obj are copied, but not the objects they reference. Copies the frozen and tainted state of obj.

Object#dup

Produces a shallow copy of obj—the instance variables of obj are copied, but not the objects they reference. dup copies the tainted state of obj. See also the discussion under Object#clone. In general, clone and dup may have different semantics in descendant classes. While clone is used to duplicate an object, including its internal state, dup typically uses the class of the descendant object to create the new instance.

This method may have class-specific behavior. If so, that behavior will be documented under the #initialize_copy method of the class.

So in essence, both produce shallow-copies of the object. clone copies the frozen and tainted state while dup copies only the tainted state. Even after reading that documentation twice, it’s still murky in my head (probably coz I have not had a chance to write code to notice the frozen or tainted state specifically.)

Here’s a gem from ruby-talk that Google brought up. So Matz says:

clone copies everything; internal state, singleton methods, etc. dup copies object contents only (plus taintness status).

And so I wrote a bit of code to see it myself (and thus remember it). Here’s a very simple Person class:

Now we instantiate a Person, p and add a singleton method to it to say hi:

See that it’s all working:

Now create a clone and a dup of it:

Both the clone and the dup have the same instance variables (which are shallow-copies BTW), but only the clone has the singleton method (#say_hi) in it:

So that makes me feel that #clone has to do more work than #dup does. Hence #dup might be more beneficial for performance compared to #clone (unless you really need to use clone). Comments are welcome!