I think the first one is actually a syntactic sugar of the other. In other words there is no behavioural difference.
What the second form allows though is to “save” the block in a variable. Then the block can be called at some other point in time – callback.
Ok. This time I went and did a quick benchmark:
require 'benchmark'
class A
def test
10.times do
yield
end
end
end
class B
def test(&block)
10.times do
block.call
end
end
end
Benchmark.bm do |b|
b.report do
a = A.new
10000.times do
a.test{ 1 + 1 }
end
end
b.report do
a = B.new
10000.times do
a.test{ 1 + 1 }
end
end
b.report do
a = A.new
100000.times do
a.test{ 1 + 1 }
end
end
b.report do
a = B.new
100000.times do
a.test{ 1 + 1 }
end
end
end
The results are interesting:
user system total real
0.090000 0.040000 0.130000 ( 0.141529)
0.180000 0.060000 0.240000 ( 0.234289)
0.950000 0.370000 1.320000 ( 1.359902)
1.810000 0.570000 2.380000 ( 2.430991)
This shows that using block.call is almost 2x slower than using yield.