Understanding the Ruby object model

Not a very long time ago, I found the Ruby object model very confusing. Part of my problem was that I was trying to model the relationships as a directed acyclic graph, whereas in reality, the model contains cycles. I’m guessing that others have found this confusing, so I’m going attempt to explain how it works in a way that my past self would have understood! Note that this is a basic explanation, and glosses over higher-level concepts like the eigenclass/metaclass (I’ll leave that for a later post).

Different things in Ruby

There are just a few things that exist in Ruby that you need to understand to really grok its object model.

Objects

Everything is an object. You can’t get very far into Ruby-land without hearing that phrase. It’s true though, everything in Ruby is an object. The interesting thing is how those objects are linked together and classified.

Classes

All objects are instances of a class. There are three special classes that are the key to understanding the Ruby object model: Object, Module and Class. More on them later.

Relations

Like I said before, it’s the links between the different objects that explain how the Ruby object model works.

Instance of/class

All objects have a class - they are instances of that class. That means that whenever you have a class, you can call .new on it to get an instance. And whenever you have an instance, you can call .class to get its class. This seems obvious, but it can get confusing when you remember that everything is an object, and so everything is an instance of a class.

Superclass/subclass

All classes have a link to a superclass. If you don’t explicitly inherit from another class in a class definition, that class will inherit directly from the Object class.

How they fit together

Here’s some code to play with:

class Animal
end

class Dog < Animal
end

fido = Dog.new

Once you know what the pieces and the relations are, it’s fairly straightforward to piece them together. All classes are an instance of Class. That includes the class Class, so there’s a circular relation there (which isn’t a problem).

Dog will basically have the following inheritance hierarchy (the superclass links):

Dog < Animal < Object < BasicObject

(Ruby 1.9 introduced BasicObject as Object’s superclass.)

The Class class has the following inheritance hierarchy:

Class < Module < Object < BasicObject

Anything that’s a class (so BasicObject, Object, Module, Class, Animal and Dog here) has Class as its class - they’re all instances of Class. Any other objects have their own classes. So fido above will have a class of Dog, 3 has a class of Fixnum, “an awesome string” has a class of String, etc. All those classes inherit from Object ultimately (although classes like Fixnum have their own complex inheritance hierarchies).

To finish things off, here’s a little diagram of what I’ve just described, showing all the class and superclass links.

The Ruby object model