Unless you are working alone, I would highly suggest to not go that route. What you think it’s ergonomic and correct, might not fit well with folk coming from other ecosystems, so you will be creating a friction point to just avoid having to write a few lines of code.
D4no0
Eiji
Of course OOP in Elixir would not work, but there are few things that looks similar and use metaprogramming to achieve similar results:
- Kernel.defoverridable/1
- oop package (old)
1
Zurga
You can “patch” the code of a module by decompiling it into Erlang Abstract Format, then do any changes and then recompile the module. You can also namespace it this way.
I implemented it here: punkix/lib/punkix/patcher.ex at master · Zurga/punkix · GitHub
Example usage is here: punkix/lib/mix/tasks/punkix/gen.live.ex at master · Zurga/punkix · GitHub
1
dimitarvp
I am mostly using Mimic and I love it, though I believe Efx is amazing but didn’t have the opportunity to use it yet.
1
yordisprieto
We encountered some indeterministic failures from patch, the error is about some supervisor stopping or crashing from the package (if I come across again I will update here)
Aside from that, it is very difficult to find the proper interface of a module since there is no behaviour to implement. Sometimes, leading to very messy code and monkey patching way too high instead of closer to where the dependency needs to actually change. Monkey patching randomly just because they can.
Personally, I would avoid patch package and stick to Mox or anything similar that requires to define a behaviour/interface for the dependencies.
2
lessless
Thanks for the feedback on the patch @yordisprieto. It would be nice to see the error, indeed.
@Hermanverschooten does Mimic work with private functions?
0
yordisprieto
** (RuntimeError) failed to start child with the spec Patch.Supervisor.
Reason: bad child specification, got: {:already_started, #PID<0.8436.0>}
1