[ruby-core:40998] Re: [Backport93 - Backport #5621] Please backport thread-safe autoloading patch

We don't use autoload for one simple reason: we support nested autoloads
and don't know ahead of time whether an intermediate module is a module or
class. Consider the following file structure:

|-app
| |-models
| | |-admin
| | | |-user.rb

At various times, I have tried to have Rails' internal structure operate by
setting up autoloads ahead of time and letting Ruby do the rest.
Unfortunately, in this case, we would have to explicitly define Admin, but
we have no way to know whether Admin is a module or class. If we define it
as a module, for instance, and user.rb looks like this:

class Admin
  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    =85
  end
end

we get: "Admin is not a class". As a result, cannot set everything up ahead
of time and have to let the first file that is autoloaded define the
intermediate namespaces.

--- ASIDE ---

While we're on the topic, http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/2740 is
probably the major remaining issue with Rails' autoload solution. To
summarize:

module Foo
  def self.const_missing(id)
    return lookup(id) if can_lookup?(id)
    raise NoConstantError
  end

  module Bar
    def self.const_missing(id)
      return lookup(id) if can_lookup?(id)
      raise NoConstantError
    end
  end
end

The reason this is needed is that this:

module Foo
  module Bar
    Baz
  end
end

has different semantics than:

module Foo::Bar
  Baz
end

Rails can't tell the difference between these two cases, and therefore
guesses that it's *probably* the first case. But consider this situation:

# foo/array.rb
module Foo
  class Array
  end
end

module Foo::Bar
  Array
end

Because we can't tell from the const_missing call that the nesting is
[Foo::Bar], we assume it's [Foo::Bar, Foo] and load in foo/array.rb even
though that is not the semantically correct behavior. In 99% of cases, this
does not cause any problems, but when it fails (for this and other
reasons), it causes pretty extreme confusion.

Yehuda Katz
(ph) 718.877.1325


On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 8:00 AM, Aaron Patterson
<[e-mail]>wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 10:35:42AM +0900, Hiroshi Nakamura wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > (2011/11/13 1:58), Mike Perham wrote:
> > > My use case: I want to use Rails in thread-safe mode in production
> > > so I don't have to fork 20 Ruby processes to handle 20 concurrent
> > > requests.  When developing, Rails auto loads classes on every
> > > request.  This auto loading is critical to Rails' rapid development
> > > cycle and there's no way I'm going to disable it.  Unfortunately
> > > the current autoload behavior makes the development environment
> > > incompatible with thread-safe mode.
> >
> > I should read ActiveSupport source code first but please allow me to
> > post lazy question.  Does Rails development mode use autoload?  It is
> > doing constant lookup by itself I guess, but I could be wrong, of cours=
e.
>
> ActiveSupport doesn't use autoload for loading missing constants, but
> supporting libraries definitely use autoloading things.  It's quite
> possible that files loaded using the missing constant hooks contain
> autoload directives.  :(
>
> --
> Aaron Patterson
> http://tenderlovemaking.com/
>