[ruby] Difference between map and collect in Ruby?

I have Googled this and got patchy / contradictory opinions - is there actually any difference between doing a map and doing a collect on an array in Ruby/Rails?

The docs don't seem to suggest any, but are there perhaps differences in method or performance?

The collect and collect! methods are aliases to map and map!, so they can be used interchangeably. Here is an easy way to confirm that:

Array.instance_method(:map) == Array.instance_method(:collect)
 => true

I did a benchmark test to try and answer this question, then found this post so here are my findings (which differ slightly from the other answers)

Here is the benchmark code:

require 'benchmark'

h = { abc: 'hello', 'another_key' => 123, 4567 => 'third' }
a = 1..10
many = 500_000

Benchmark.bm do |b|
  GC.start

  b.report("hash keys collect") do
    many.times do
      h.keys.collect(&:to_s)
    end
  end

  GC.start

  b.report("hash keys map") do
    many.times do
      h.keys.map(&:to_s)
    end
  end

  GC.start

  b.report("array collect") do
    many.times do
      a.collect(&:to_s)
    end
  end

  GC.start

  b.report("array map") do
    many.times do
      a.map(&:to_s)
    end
  end
end

And the results I got were:

                   user     system      total        real
hash keys collect  0.540000   0.000000   0.540000 (  0.570994)
hash keys map      0.500000   0.010000   0.510000 (  0.517126)
array collect      1.670000   0.020000   1.690000 (  1.731233)
array map          1.680000   0.020000   1.700000 (  1.744398) 

Perhaps an alias isn't free?

I've been told they are the same.

Actually they are documented in the same place under ruby-doc.org:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Array.html#M000249

• ary.collect {|item| block } ? new_ary
• ary.map {|item| block } ? new_ary
• ary.collect ? an_enumerator
• ary.map ? an_enumerator

Invokes block once for each element of self. Creates a new array containing the values returned by the block. See also Enumerable#collect.
If no block is given, an enumerator is returned instead.

a = [ "a", "b", "c", "d" ]
a.collect {|x| x + "!" }   #=> ["a!", "b!", "c!", "d!"]
a                          #=> ["a", "b", "c", "d"]

#collect is actually an alias for #map. That means the two methods can be used interchangeably, and effect the same behavior.

Ruby aliases the method Array#map to Array#collect; they can be used interchangeably. (Ruby Monk)

In other words, same source code :

               static VALUE
rb_ary_collect(VALUE ary)
{
long i;
VALUE collect;

RETURN_SIZED_ENUMERATOR(ary, 0, 0, ary_enum_length);
collect = rb_ary_new2(RARRAY_LEN(ary));
for (i = 0; i < RARRAY_LEN(ary); i++) {
    rb_ary_push(collect, rb_yield(RARRAY_AREF(ary, i)));
}
return collect;
}

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.0/Array.html#method-i-map