Eigenclass

In Ruby, there’s the concept of eigenclasses, or singleton classes. These are classes implicitly defined when attaching methods to a single instance.

From Wikipedia:

Ruby is object-oriented: every data type is an object, including classes and types which many other languages designate as primitives (such as integers, booleans, and “nil”). Every function is a method. Named values (variables) always designate references to objects, not the objects themselves. Ruby supports inheritance with dynamic dispatch, mixins and singleton methods (belonging to, and defined for, a single instance rather than being defined on the class).

Here I present an example I hope will make it simple to understand. We know martial artists can fight, right? And we know Jackie Chan can play while fighting, right? Now suppose there’s no Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan is the only one who do fancy things while fighting. All other martial artists are Bruce Lee-like. What do we do? Extend MartialArtist class to create a FunnyMartialArtist class which will get instantiated only once? Instead, we can just add a method do_funny_fighting to jackie_chan object which is an instance of MartialArtist. This way:

class MartialArtist
  ...
end

jackie_chan = MartialArtist.new
bruce_lee = MartialArtist.new

def jackie_chan.do_funny_fighting
  ...
end

Now we can call jackie_chan.do_funny_fighting, but not bruce_lee.do_funny_fighting. This is a singleton method.

How does this work? Under the hood, there’s a pointer in jackie_chan to the MartialArtist class. If Ruby modifies its content to add the new method, it will also affects bruce_lee object. So, Ruby creates a new class, adds the method to it and updates jackie_chan class pointer to point to this new class (and this class points to previous MartialArtist class). This new class is an eigenclass.

That’s a simple way to say it without dealing with much details. But if you’re eager to learn more, I recommend Patrick Farley’s post about metaclasses. There are also a lot of links there to dig deeper.