From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2003-01-24T23:29:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on?

On Saturday, January 25, 2003, 1:10:00 AM, Warren wrote:

>  it would also be nice to have all the libs assorted like
>         File/
>                 Filetools.....
>                         ......
>         IO/
>                 Pipe.....
>         IPC/
>                 Msg
>                 SysV......


This would be nice.  In the volunteer, every man do his bit, world of
Ruby library development, it's not possible to centrally manage this,
though.

However, Ruby has a nice ability to create aliases to classes/modules,
so someone could manage a file that looks like this (I'll demonstrate
with IPC, since File and IO are built-in classes):

  module IPC
    module Msg
      require 'ipcmsglib' # Fictitious library installed on system
      include IpcMsgLib
      # IpcMsgLib::foo now available as IPC::Msg::foo
    end

    module SysV
      require 'sysvipc' # Fictitious library installed on system
      include SysVIPC
      # SysVIPC::quux now available as IPC::SysV::quux
    end
  end


This could be broken up substantially to save startup time, so the
IPC::SysV module is defined in 'ipc/sysv', so only when you require
that library does it fetch and include the real SystemV IPC library.

To avoid treading on other namespaces, you'd probably put all of this
in its own module Std, and directory 'std'.  So code looks like this:

  require 'std/ipc/msg'

  Std::IPC::Msg::foo ...

Or this:

  require 'std/ipc'      # we get everything available in IPC

  include Std            # include this for convenience if safe

  IPC::Msg::foo ...
  IPC::SysV::quux ...
  

I think this is a good idea, but unlikely to happen anytime soon.
It's nice that Ruby can do it, though.  There may be quicker ways to
implement it, too, like "IPC::SysV = ::SysVIPC" or something, but I
wanted to highlight conditional library mapping.

Gavin