How does object_id assignment work?

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In MRI the object_id of an object is the same as the VALUE that represents the object on the C level. For most kinds of objects this VALUE is a pointer to a location in memory where the actual object data is stored. Obviously this will be different during multiple runs because it only depends on where the system decided to allocate the memory, not on any property of the object itself.

However for performance reasons true, false, nil and Fixnums are handled specially. For these objects there isn’t actually a struct with the object’s data in memory. All of the object’s data is encoded in the VALUE itself. As you already figured out the values for false, true, nil and any Fixnum i, are 0, 2, 4 and i*2+1 respectively.

The reason that this works is that on any systems that MRI runs on, 0, 2, 4 and i*2+1 are never valid addresses for an object on the heap, so there’s no overlap with pointers to object data.

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