When to use `require`, `load` or `autoload` in Ruby?

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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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