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I understand the subtle differences between require, load and autoload in Ruby, but my question is, how do you know which one to use?
Other than being able to "wrap" a load in an anonymous module, require seems to be preferred.
But then autoload allows you to lazy load files -- which sounds fantastic but I'm not sure practically what you gain over require
Is one method preferred over the other? Is there a situation where one method stands out?
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You should use load function mainly for the purpose of loading code from other files that are being dynamically changed so as to get updated code every time. Require reads the file from the file system, parses it, saves to the memory, and runs it in a given place.
-Auto_load: this initiates the method that is in hat file and allows the interpreter to call the method. -require_relative: allows the loading to take place of the local folders and files.
The require method takes the name of the file to require, as a string, as a single argument. This can either be a path to the file, such as ./lib/some_library. rb or a shortened name, such as some_library. If the argument is a path and complete filename, the require method will look there for the file.
Rails automatically reloads classes and modules if application files in the autoload paths change. More precisely, if the web server is running and application files have been modified, Rails unloads all autoloaded constants managed by the main autoloader just before the next request is processed.
Generally, you should use require. load will re-load the code every time, so if you do it from several modules, you will be doing a lot of extra work. The lazyness of autoload sounds nice in theory, but many Ruby modules do things like monkey-patching other classes, which means that the behavior of unrelated parts of your program may depend on whether a given class has been used yet or not.
If you want to make your own automatic reloader that loads your code every time it changes or every time someone hits a URL (for development purposes so you don't have to restart your server every time), then using load for that is reasonable.
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