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> In Ruby 2.2, symbols will be garbage collected like all other Ruby objects

This sounds like it must be an oversimplification. What benefit do symbols have over strings, other than immutability? I thought their persistence in memory was a main selling point for using them as hash keys, for instance.

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I don't think persistence in memory was the selling point. The other selling point is that doing comparisons are faster because `:a == :a` can compare on a memory address while `'a' == 'a'` requires comparing the data at the different memory addresses.

Someone tell me I'm wrong.

You're right. Also they symbols won't be garbage collected if they are currently keys in a hash.

symbols should also be instantiated at most once causing possible memory savings, but recent rubys should do that for frozen strings too.

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