Lazy Requiring Dependencies in Ruby Discussion

I love removing dependencies. 💖

Also, learning how libraries can make features or dependencies optional is a great thing to learn along the way.

Yes, I find that reducing dependencies makes the source code cleaner and easier to maintain.

Lazy requiring dependencies in Ruby can improve performance by loading libraries only when needed. You can achieve this using autoload, conditional require, or defining methods that require dependencies only when executed. However, be cautious of thread-safety issues and potential debugging complexity. A good practice is balancing lazy loading with maintainability.

I hope you continue to share more quality content like this in the future. Thank you author!

You have to remember to add the require: false option when adding the gem to the Gemfile, right?

Alexandre, that's not needed for this. For example, your Rails app can load SQLite, then Rails itself will load the database config and ensure that SQLite gem is required as a double check.

Using require: false would just move the loading of SQLite from boot and instead load SQLite when Rails requires it. It's not going to give you a benefit in your application because it will be required either way.

This is more for libraries that have optional dependencies. This way Rails doesn't have to add SQLite as a dependency for everyone, it can optionally require the gem later on.

Lazy requiring dependencies in Ruby is a technique where you defer loading (requiring) a library or module until it’s actually needed, rather than requiring it at the top of a file or at application startup. This approach can improve performance by reducing memory usage and speeding up application boot times, especially in large Rails applications with many dependencies.