[Watson1978]

Ox.load(..., mode: :hash_no_attrs) creates a temporary Ruby String for every element name, associates its encoding, and immediately interns it. Repeated tags therefore allocate a new String even when the name is already interned.

Use rb_intern3() directly on the name bytes, preserving the parser's encoding and the ASCII-8BIT fallback of rb_str_new2(). This removes one temporary String per element. The change is limited to hash_no_attrs.

On Ruby 4.0.6 / arm64, parsing 40,000 records with five text fields per record:

	Before	After
Parse time	34.65 ms	29.78 ms	14% up
Allocated objects	480,006	240,005	1/2 down

This is a 14% reduction in parse time. Each process warmed up twice, then measured seven parses with GC.start before each measurement. Results above are the medians of four process-level medians, alternating the before/after execution order. All result digests matched.

The input was generated with:

xml = '<rows>' + '<row id="1"><name>Alice</name><city>Tokyo</city><age>30</age><status>active</status><note>hello</note></row>' * 40_000 + '</rows>'
Ox.load(xml, mode: :hash_no_attrs)

Validation:

• Added coverage for UTF-8, Shift_JIS and binary names with both Symbol and String keys, repeated elements, XML-declared encoding, and encoded names passed to element_key_mod. These tests also pass against the original implementation.
• Added Ox.load_file coverage for the ASCII-8BIT fallback with Symbol and String keys. The test fails when that fallback is deliberately changed to UTF-8 in an isolated build.
• Encoding tests use the input String or XML declaration and reset default options; they also pass when run after setting the default encoding to ASCII-8BIT.
• test/hash_load_test.rb: 15 tests, 72 assertions passed.
• The additional *_test.rb suite (using the Rake test task's exclusions): 340 tests, 7,007 assertions passed.
• test/tests.rb passed.
• git diff --check passed.