From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2009-11-25T07:21:03+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] autoloader, version 0.0.2

On 11/24/2009 07:06 PM, David Masover wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 November 2009 06:43:20 am Robert Klemme wrote:

>> Btw, one disadvantage of using a directory glob is that it is far more
>> expensive than the standard autoload because the standard autoload
>> does not need any file system IO before any file is loaded.  Using
>> directory globbing on the other hand requires to at least read the
>> directory which may slow down startup of a script considerably.
> 
> Except that standard autoload is more work for me, and nearly defeats the 
> point. Trading requires for autoloads directly makes things harder to debug 
> without making them easier to write -- it _only_ optimizes start time.

Yeah, absolutely.  If your major goal is to simplify script writing this 
is definitive a good option.  I just wanted to point out that the 
convenience comes at a price. :-)

> One possibility would be to write a script which attempts to automatically 
> generate these autoload statements, but store them statically in a single 
> file. The main reason I don't like that is, you've now added a "compile" step 
> to a script. It might work as an option, maybe a "development" vs "production" 
> mode.

Yeah, ugly.

> Another possibility is to override const_missing, but that gets complex fast, 
> as Rails shows.
> 
> Also, keep in mind that the directory IO is shallow. That is, if you tell it 
> to autoload foo, it won't touch anything in foo/bar. If you create a file 
> bar.rb which requires autoload, it will look at foo/bar, but only once Bar is 
> autoloaded.
> 
> Thanks for the feedback!

You're welcome!  Thanks for taking the time to digest it.

Kind regards

	robert

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