Dynamic method calling in Ruby

is there any reason to ever use send?

call needs a method object, send doesn’t:

class Foo
  def method_missing(name)
    "#{name} called"
  end
end

Foo.new.send(:bar)         #=> "bar called"
Foo.new.method(:bar).call  #=> undefined method `bar' for class `Foo' (NameError)

is there any reason to ever use eval?

eval evaluates arbitrary expressions, it’s not just for calling a method.

Regarding benchmarks, send seems to be faster than method + call:

require 'benchmark'

class Foo
  def bar; end
end

Benchmark.bm(4) do |b|
  b.report("send") { 1_000_000.times { Foo.new.send(:bar) } }
  b.report("call") { 1_000_000.times { Foo.new.method(:bar).call } }
end

Result:

           user     system      total        real
send   0.210000   0.000000   0.210000 (  0.215181)
call   0.740000   0.000000   0.740000 (  0.739262)