I came across this answer and I wanted to compare the two options in terms of performance to see which one is better:
a.reduce Hash.new, :merge
a.inject(:merge)
using the ruby benchmark module, it turns out that option (2) a.inject(:merge) is faster.
code used for comparison:
require 'benchmark'
input = [{b: "c"}, {e: "f"}, {h: "i"}, {k: "l"}]
n = 50_000
Benchmark.bm do |benchmark|
benchmark.report("reduce") do
n.times do
input.reduce Hash.new, :merge
end
end
benchmark.report("inject") do
n.times do
input.inject(:merge)
end
end
end
the results were
user system total real
reduce 0.125098 0.003690 0.128788 ( 0.129617)
inject 0.078262 0.001439 0.079701 ( 0.080383)