For reference I wrote this article about a year ago according to the commits at the astruct repo. I never submitted it because I got frustrated with the Ruby MRI source contribution process. astruct could definitely use some cleaning up, but actually runs much better in 2.1.0 so the details still stand.

Hello Ruby Core,

In this Pull Request I have made a series of changes that I would like to be added to the Ruby stdlib library ostruct. Before getting into anything I want to stress one thing: All changes are backwards compatible with the previous ostruct library. Any non-compatible changes are what I consider bug fixes and assumed behavior corrections.

First a list of problems with the current OpenStruct class:

• OpenStruct is used to create open structured objects and also is often used to give it’s open structure behavior to other classes. It is not always desirable or favorable to force the developer to inherit this class.
• OpenStruct behaves somewhat similarly to a Hash, but lacks a full duck typing and assumed behavior. Importantly to this point OpenStruct can be built from, updated with, and dump to a Hash. It even has a similar public interfaces like Hash#delete(), but defined as OpenStruct#delete_field(), or merge and merge! as OpenStruct#marshal_load().

• All of the public and private methods on the OpenStruct are open to easy and annoying overloading. Some of the current methods use other public methods that are likely to be overloaded. A good example of this danger is the current OpenStruct#inspect method, which calls OpenStruct#object_id. It also causes problems like this:

  example = OpenStruct.new
  example.marshal_load = "example;example;example"
    # => "example;example;example"
  example.table
    # => nil
  example
    # => #<OpenStruct marshal_load="example;example;example">
  example.marshal_load
    # => ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)
  example.marshal_load "red"
    # => NoMethodError: undefined method `each_key' for "red":String
  example
    # => #<OpenStruct:0x3fd970c44120>
  example.table
    # => TypeError: can't convert Symbol into Integer
  

Second, in order to address the issues I was having I first built a gem to solve my problem. All of the below things I’ve done have been done in this gem and remain readily available for your use.

• The OpenStruct#delete_field method only deletes the table key/value. This is not the expected behavior and ultimately leaves a lot of junk around in the method table.
• When using OpenStruct#marshal_load it would correctly create getter and setter methods for each key/value, but it would also delete the entire table. I don’t believe this to be expected or intelligent behavior.
• One of the tests freezes an OpenStruct object and then redefines OpenStruct#frozen? and it works. Freezing should stop any changes to the object.

• In order to allow developers to create both OpenStruct-like objects and create regular OpenStruct objects original I have created a module nested in the OpenStruct class called Behavior. That module contains all of the behavior OpenStruct actually receives. Here’s an example of what this affords:

  class Configuration < BasicObject
    include OpenStruct::Behavior
  end
  

• I’ve designed it so that all the public methods are wrapped in double underscores in the same way that Object#__send__ and many other important methods are named.
• I’ve aliased “underscore” methods to the important methods like OpenStruct#__freeze__ to OpenStruct#freeze.
• In addition, I have aliased many methods to their “underscore” forms (ie. OpenStruct#inspect aliased to OpenStruct#__inspect__) to avoid confusion. This works even when someone later overloads those method names.
• Because of the nature of alias_method you can now define a key/value “object_id” and still have access to the original OpenStruct#object_id with OpenStruct#__object_id__. This avoids the overloading bug explained previously.
• I have added the ability to only dump a specific set of keys with the OpenStruct#__dump__ method. This was added to further Hash like behavior.
• I have further improved the tests for this library by either breaking them up into manageable pieces or refined for readability. There are now test for other features of OpenStruct as well as tests for the new features added in this pull request.

In addition to fixing bugs, improving the interface and removing surprising behavior, I used two types of benchmarking: Benchmark#bmbm and Benchmark#ips (benchmark-ips gem), both showing favorable results for my version of ostruct. Here are the results