Ruby Autoloading Explained

In the ruby programming language a distinction is made between loading and autoloading. For those of you familiar with Rails, this will shed some light on the change from config.load_paths to config.autoload_paths in Rails 3. The difference lies in when the class is actually called/initialized.

Let’s say I have defined a SpecialLibrary class:

# In special_library.rb
class SpecialLibrary
  puts "Loading Special Library"
  ...
end

When I load or require the class, the entire class code is run:

irb(main):001:0> require 'special_library'
Loading Special Library
=> true

When I autoload the class, the class code is only run when I actually use the class:

irb(main):001:0> autoload :SpecialLibrary, 'special_library'
=> nil
irb(main):002:0> SpecialLibrary.new
Loading Special Library
=> #

The reason config.load_paths was changed to config.autoload_paths in Rails 3 is because the paths defined here were being auto-loaded and not simply required, so config.autoload_paths is more descriptive and accurately describes the behavior.