Autoresearch Ideas

Dead Ends (tried and failed)

Tag name interning (skip+byte dispatch): saves 878 allocs but verification loop overhead kills speed
String dedup (-@) for filter names: no alloc savings, creates temp strings anyway
Split-based tokenizer: 2.5x faster C-level split but can't handle {{ followed by %} nesting
Streaming tokenizer: needs own StringScanner (+alloc), per-shift overhead worse than eager array
Merge simple_lookup? into initialize: logic overhead offsets saved index call
Cursor for filter scanning: cursor.reset overhead worse than inline byte loops
Direct strainer call: YJIT already inlines context.invoke_single well
TruthyCondition subclass: YJIT polymorphism at evaluate call site hurts more than 115 saved allocs
Index loop for filters: YJIT optimizes each+destructure MUCH better than manual filter[0]/filter[1]

YJIT monomorphism > allocation reduction at this scale
C-level StringScanner.scan/skip > Ruby-level byte loops (already applied)
String#split is 2.5x faster than manual tokenization, but Liquid's grammar is too complex for regex
74% of total CPU time is GC — alloc reduction is the highest-leverage optimization
But YJIT-deoptimization from polymorphism costs more than the GC savings

Tokenizer: use String#index + byteslice instead of StringScanner: avoid the StringScanner overhead entirely for the simple case of finding {%/{{ delimiters
Pre-freeze all Condition operator lambdas: reduce alloc in Condition initialization
Avoid @blocks = [] in If with single-element optimization: use @block ivar for single condition, only create array for elsif
Reduce ForloopDrop allocation: reuse ForloopDrop objects across iterations or use a lighter-weight object
VariableLookup: single-segment optimization: for "product.title" (1 lookup), use an ivar instead of 1-element Array