On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Andy Rose <[email protected]> wrote:
Hey Xavier, thanks so much! Really appreciate your answer! > > Could you maybe describe to me (or point me in the right direction) to how > content autoloading happens? > Love that you ask, because a new guide on the topic is precisely out :) http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/autoloading_and_reloading_constants.html (Pointing to the edge guide because there are some minor enhancements that are going to be out with 4.2.1 but didn't make it for 4.2.0.) You know what it? I've kinda solved the issue by just referencing the > constant explicitly. But I'm really curious as to how Rails ends up > throwing that circular dependency exception. > Yes, that's another one. It's analogous to issuing require_dependency calls, except that the file gets loaded via autoloading instead of explicitly. Like... I get what happens when you have a non-threadsafe variable... > because actually setting a variable requires multiple steps in the MRI and > so while one thread is reading from a variable before setting it, another > thread has already set it to something. > > But what's going on here.... like... one thread tries to autoload a > constant... and then before it's done another thread does the same and > then... why does that result in a circular reference exception? Any ideas? > The two key ideas are: 1) Constant autoloading goes through a regular method call, the method is const_missing (you'll see that in the guide). 2) As far a Ruby is concerned, a class definition is code, there's nothing atomic. So, context switching may happen in the middle of the interpretation of the class definition. Albeit unlikely, it could be the case that context-switching happens even before the constant has been defined, and then another const_missing for the same constant could be triggered by a different thread for example resulting in the same file being loaded twice (which would not be circular indeed in that case, but the error message does not distinguish): $ cat app/models/foo.rb sleep 1 Foo = 1 $ bin/rails runner '[Thread.new { Foo }, Thread.new { Foo }].each(&:join)' ... Circular dependency detected while autoloading constant Foo (RuntimeError) See? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/CAM%3DYcdj60OLwEbTaiKBXEr0-mfKzzr_A%2B4Uc6rAN_3VRsttzxw%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
