ActiveRecord#respond_to? No longer allocates strings

This is an alternative to https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/34195

The active record `respond_to?` method needs to do two things if `super` does not say that the method exists. It has to see if the "name" being passed in represents a column in the table. If it does then it needs to pass it to `has_attribute?` to see if the key exists in the current object. The reason why this is slow is that `has_attribute?` needs a string and most (almost all) objects passed in are symbols.

The only time we need to allocate a string in this method is if the column does exist in the database, and since these are a limited number of strings (since column names are a finite set) then we can pre-generate all of them and use the same string. 

We generate a list hash of column names and convert them to symbols, and store the value as the string name. This allows us to both check if the "name" exists as a column, but also provides us with a string object we can use for the `has_attribute?` call. 

I then ran the test suite and found there was only one case where we're intentionally passing in a string and changed it to a symbol. (However there are tests where we are using a string key, but they don't ship with rails).

As re-written this method should never allocate unless the user passes in a string key, which is fairly uncommon with `respond_to?`.

This also eliminates the need to special case every common item that might come through the method via the `case` that was originally added in https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/f80aa5994603e684e3fecd3f53bfbf242c73a107 (by me) and then with an attempt to extend in https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/34195.

As a bonus this reduces 6,300 comparisons (in the CodeTriage app homepage) to 450 as we also no longer need to loop through the column array to check for an `include?`.

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/activerecord/lib/active_record/nested_attributes.rb b/activerecord/lib/active_record/nested_attributes.rb
index 50767ee93f..8b9098df6c 100644
--- a/activerecord/lib/active_record/nested_attributes.rb
+++ b/activerecord/lib/active_record/nested_attributes.rb
@@ -426,7 +426,7 @@ module ActiveRecord
             existing_record.assign_attributes(assignable_attributes)
             association(association_name).initialize_attributes(existing_record)
           else
-            method = "build_#{association_name}"
+            method = :"build_#{association_name}"
             if respond_to?(method)
               send(method, assignable_attributes)
             else