From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2011-01-11T07:39:46+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:34316] Re: Avoiding $LOAD_PATH pollution

On Jan 9, 2011, at 23:33, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> The base protocol seems fine to me. I think you and I discussed it on
> IRC at some point. I like its simplicity.
> 
> I do have a concern for the additional overhead it adds to all
> requires. case/when matching does a dispatch to ===, so that's a
> dyncall for every element at the very least. Probably could be
> short-circuited in the C code.

In C code I would only dispatch if a path element wasn't a T_STRING object

> The loaded? implementation is broken like gem_prelude on systems with
> case-insensitive filesystems like OS X and Windows. JRuby just added a
> change to "require" that the $" search is done case-insensitively when
> on a case-insensitive filesystem, but it's an experimental change. We
> made it originally to work around problems in gem_prelude that
> disappeared when we wiped out gem_prelude�

For a real #loaded? implementation I would prefer using the built-in C functionality in rb_require.

> The specified protocol would also greatly simplify logic in JRuby to
> load files from URLs and classloader resources. Where currently we
> have special-cased logic to search those types of artifacts, with your
> change we'd simply register "finders" in the load path that can handle
> them.
> 
> This probably could also tie into the Ruby Archive RSoC project,
> allowing MRI to also load code from archives. I did not follow that
> project closely enough to know its status.

Yes, I was thinking about this use-case.