Should we be autoloading?

[thomthom]

Just thinking out loud here...

Since the SketchUp Ruby API environment is a shared one - would it not be best practice for us (developers) to use autoload instead of require?

This would not be feasible with scrambled ruby files as they rely on Sketchup::require - but for all the unscrambled ruby files. The majority is unscrambled. And users have many many plugins installed - often they will use only a fraction of them.

I'm not expecting a major memory benefit - but I do think that we could expect improvement in SketchUp startup times.

(Sidenote - I do suspect that toolbar creation is a major component in the startup time. Something that ought to be investigated.)

Fire at will!

[Aerilius]

That sounds interesting.
It's not "thread safe" but I don't think that matters for us.
Symbols don't support colons, so nested modules would be done like in the comments here: http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-techniques-revealed-autoload-1652.html

How much would be the performance gain?
One could do some testing (I'll do this evening) like plugins normal, plugins disabled, plugins with autoload.

[Dan Rathbun]

I remember trying this a long time ago.. but did not get it working. Maybe I used it wrong?

As I remember it loads modules, not scripts. So perhaps the name of the script must be the same as the module ?

[thomthom]

@dan rathbun said:

I remember trying this a long time ago.. but did not get it working. Maybe I used it wrong?

I do have it working for a large project I'm working on. I set up some of the mixing modules and base classes to autoload.

<span class="syntaxdefault"><br />&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxcomment">#&nbsp;Ensure&nbsp;abstract&nbsp;classes&nbsp;are&nbsp;loaded&nbsp;and&nbsp;found&nbsp;when&nbsp;needed.<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">autoload</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(&nbsp;;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">Observable</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">File</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">join</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">PATH</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxstring">'observable.rb'&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)&nbsp;)<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">autoload</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(&nbsp;;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">BezierEntity</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">File</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">join</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">PATH</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxstring">'bezier_entity.rb'&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)&nbsp;)<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">autoload</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(&nbsp;;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">BezierPatch</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">File</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">join</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault">PATH</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxstring">'bezier_patch.rb'&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)&nbsp;)<br />&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault"></span>