When is class side initialize sent?

Question

I am curious about when the class side initialize messages are sent in Smalltalk (Pharo and Squeak particularly). Is there any specified order? Is it at least safe to assume all other classes packaged with it have already been loaded and compiled, or does the system eagerly initialize (send initialize before even finishing loading and compiling the other classes)?

Answer 1

The class-side initialize is never sent by the system. During development you do it manually (which is why many of these methods have a "self initialize" comment.

When exporting code of a class into a changeset, the exporter puts a send of initialize at the very end, so it gets executed when the class is loaded into another system.

This behavior is mimicked by Monticello. When loading a class for the first time, or when the code of the initialize method was changed, it is executed. That is because conceptually MC builds a changeset on-the-fly containing the difference of what is in the image already and what the package to be loaded contains. If that diff includes a class-side initialize method, it will be executed when loading that package version.