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I am working on developing an API for a test suite. One of the methods in the API requires the use of a library that isn't needed anywhere else in the API.
My question is whether the require statement for using the library should be placed inside the method or every time the API loads. The library isn't very large so it won't have a significant effect on performance.
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The include and require methods do very different things. The require method does what include does in most other programming languages: run another file. It also tracks what you've required in the past and won't require the same file twice.
In short: no, Ruby does not support nested methods. Note also that in Ruby, method bodies cannot be closures, only block bodies can. This pretty much eliminates the major use case for nested methods, since even if Ruby supported nested methods, you couldn't use the outer method's variables in the nested method.
Require reads the file from the file system, parses it, saves to the memory, and runs it in a given place. In require, if you modify the specified file when the script is running, those modifications won't be applied, Ruby will use the file from memory, not from the file system of the machine.
Ruby looks in all the paths specified in the $LOAD_PATH array.
If the dependency has good namespace organization (won't pollute the global namespace) and isn't large (won't slow startup times), I'd say put it at the top of the file. It's where people expect to find require statements. If it has either of those problems, consider putting it in the most limited scope possible.
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