ruby: calling a instance method without using instance - ruby

Question

I know in ruby, when we call an instance method, we need to firstly instantiate a class object.
But when I see a open sourced code I got confused.
The code is like this:
File Message.rb
require 'json'
module Yora
module Message
def serialize(msg)
JSON.generate(msg)
end
def deserialize(raw, symbolized_key = true)
msg = JSON.parse(raw, create_additions: true)
if symbolized_key
Hash[msg.map { |k, v| [k.to_sym, v] }]
else
msg
end
end
end
end
File. Persistance.rb
require 'fileutils'
require_relative 'message'
module Yora
module Persistence
class SimpleFile
include Message
def initialize(node_id, node_address)
#node_id, #node_address = node_id, node_address
FileUtils.mkdir_p "data/#{node_id}"
#log_path = "data/#{node_id}/log.txt"
#metadata_path = "data/#{node_id}/metadata.txt"
#snapshot_path = "data/#{node_id}/snapshot.txt"
end
def read_metadata
metadata = {
current_term: 0,
voted_for: nil,
cluster: { #node_id => #node_address }
}
if File.exist?(#metadata_path)
metadata = deserialize(File.read(#metadata_path)) #<============
end
$stderr.puts "-- metadata = #{metadata}"
metadata
end
.....
You can see the line I marked with "<==="
It uses deserialize function that been defined in message class.
And from message class we can see that method is a instance method, not class method.
So why can we call it without instantiating anything like this?
thanks

Answer 1

Message ist an module. Your Class SimpleFile includes this module. so the module methods included in your class SimpleFile. that means, all module methods can now be used like as methods from SimpleFile
see http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.0/Module.html for more infos about module in ruby. it's a great feature.

Answer 2

It is being called on an instance. In Ruby, if you leave out the explicit receiver of the message send, an implicit receiver of self is assumed. So, deserialize is being called on an instance, namely self.
Note that this exact same phenomenon also occurs in other places in your code, much earlier (in line 1, in fact):
require 'fileutils'
require_relative 'message'
Here, you also have two method calls without an explicit receiver, which means that the implicit receiver is self.