Let’s start today’s post with a weird Ruby benchmark: require "benchmark/ips" class Foo def initialize forward forward ? go_forward : go_backward end ivars = ("a".."zz").map { |name| "@#{name} = 5" } # define the go_forward method eval "def go_forward; #{ivars.join("; ")} end" # define the go_backward method eval "def go_backward; #{ivars.reverse.join("; ")} end" end # Heat Foo.new true Foo.new fa