Ruby Array concat versus + speed?

Question

I did small performance test of Ruby\'s array concat() vs + operation and concat() was way too fast.

I however am not clear on why

Answer 1

According to the Ruby docs, the difference is:

Array#+ :

Concatenation — Returns a new array built by concatenating the two arrays together to produce a third array.

Array#concat :

Array#concat : Appends the elements of other_ary to self.

So the + operator will create a new array each time it is called (which is expensive), while concat only appends the new element.

Answer 2

The answer lies in Ruby's underlying C implementation of the + operator and the concat methods.

Array#+

rb_ary_plus(VALUE x, VALUE y)
{
    VALUE z;
    long len, xlen, ylen;

    y = to_ary(y);
    xlen = RARRAY_LEN(x);
    ylen = RARRAY_LEN(y);
    len = xlen + ylen;
    z = rb_ary_new2(len);

    ary_memcpy(z, 0, xlen, RARRAY_CONST_PTR(x));
    ary_memcpy(z, xlen, ylen, RARRAY_CONST_PTR(y));
    ARY_SET_LEN(z, len);
    return z;
}

Array#concat

rb_ary_concat(VALUE x, VALUE y)
{
    rb_ary_modify_check(x);
    y = to_ary(y);
    if (RARRAY_LEN(y) > 0) {
        rb_ary_splice(x, RARRAY_LEN(x), 0, y);
    }
    return x;
}

As you can see, the + operator is copying the memory from each array, then creating and returning a third array with the contents of both. The concat method is simply splicing the new array into the original one.