[urbanautomaton]

Rails does overload Ruby's autoload (naturally - no core functionality can remain un-monkeypatched. ;-)), but not for the on-demand autoloading the article describes, which is what most users contend with most frequently, and was what I most wanted to demystify. Thanks for the clarification though - I'll try to make the distinction clearer.

[pothibo]

>>Rails does overload Ruby's autoload (naturally - no core functionality can remain un-monkeypatched. ;-))

Are you sure about that? To me it seems that if you pass a path to autoload, it does work like ruby STL https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activesupport/lib...

[urbanautomaton]

Yep - if you pass a path the behaviour is as normal, but it's still overloaded to support the path inference behaviour. I guess it's not really monkeypatching though as `Module` itself is not modified, and you have to deliberately choose to use `ActiveSupport::Autoload`, so I reluctantly retract my parenthetical snark. :-)