Feature #12962
closed
Feature Proposal: Extend 'protected' to support module friendship
Description
When working on a larger library, with many classes that have both official API methods and internal supporting methods, it can be hard to distinguish between them.
In Rails, for example, we currently do this using :nodoc: -- if a method is hidden from the documentation, it is not part of the officially supported API, even if it has public visibility.
This approach can be confusing for users, however, because they can find methods that seem to do what they want, and start calling them, without ever looking at the documentation: either by just guessing a likely method name, or even being guided to it by did_you_mean.
Method visibility controls seem like the right solution to this problem: if we make the methods private or protected, users can still choose to call them, but only by first acknowledging that they're using internal API. However, as we have object oriented internals, a lot of our internal API calls are between instances of unrelated classes... and using send on all those calls would make our own code very untidy.
I propose that the solution to this problem is to make protected more widely useful, by allowing a module to nominate other modules that are allowed to call its protected methods.
class A
protected def foo
"secrets"
end
end
class D
def call_foo
A.new.foo
end
end
A.friend D
D.new.call_foo # => "secrets"
This change is backwards compatible for existing uses of protected: a module is always considered its own friend (so calls that previously worked will continue to do so), and classes have no other friends by default (so calls that were previously disallowed will also continue to do so).
Using a module, a library can easily establish a 'friendship group' of related classes without needing to link them individually, as well as providing a single opt-in for user code that consciously chooses to use unsupported APIs.
module MyLib
module Internals
end
class A
include Internals
friend Internals
protected def foo
"implementation"
end
end
class B
include Internals
friend Internals
protected def bar
A.new.foo
end
end
end
class UserCode
def call_things
[MyLib::A.new.foo, MyLib::B.new.bar]
end
end
class FriendlyUserCode
include MyLib::Internals
def call_things
[MyLib::A.new.foo, MyLib::B.new.bar]
end
end
UserCode.new.call_things # !> NoMethodError: protected method `foo'..
FriendlyUserCode.new.call_things # => ["implementation", "implementation"]
This change seems in keeping with the ruby philosophy that a method's visibility is more of a guideline than a strictly enforced rule -- here, we allow the callee to blur the line, instead of leaving it up to the caller to use send.
The implementation is surprisingly simple, and only adds time (searching an array of friends, instead of only looking for the current class) after a method call has already resolved to a protected method.
While I'm personally most interested in how this could be applied in a Rails-sized project (such as.. Rails), I believe it would provide a helpful clarifying tool to any library that has multiple collaborating classes, whose instances are also exposed to user code.
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