ruby / ruby/rbs

Thread/Fiber/Kernel#raise is incorrectly labeled

Open
#1,667 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
2.2k
Forks
256
Avg merge
6d 17h
Merged PRs (30d)
37

Description

Small issues

Thread#raise is incorrectly written as def self?.raise when it should just be def raise

Big issues

More fundamentally, the method signature for Kernel/Thread/Fiber#raise is flawed, even on the official documentation. I am unsure if the current (Ruby 3.2.2) behavior is the intended one, or if the documentation is the intended one.

To my surprise, raise very interesting & complex behavior. Specifically, these are the rules I found for raise on Fiber, and Thread via experimentation (the official documentation is also not quite correct unfortunately). They may not be the only rules though.

def raise: () -> nil
         | (String message) -> nil
         | (Exception ex) -> nil # (edit 5) change from Exception class to Exception instance
         | (_Exception ex) -> nil
         | (_Exception ex, _ToS message) -> nil # (1) change from String to _ToS
         | (_Exception ex, _ToS message, String backtrace) -> nil # (2) change from Array[String] to String
         | (_Exception ex, _ToS message, Array[String] backtrace) -> nil # (3) change from String to _ToS
         | (_Exception, **kwargs) -> nil # (4) new rule

For Kernel, the rules are the same except it also accepts an optional keyword argument ?cause: Exception at every rule variant. Note that cause: is not _Exception but Exception - _Exception is a class interface, Exception is an instance of that interface.

Here are the explanations behind each change

  1. Any object that can be to_s will be accepted as a valid message
  2. If only one String argument is provided for backtrace, it will treat it like an array of one element
  3. Same as 1
  4. All keyword arguments (except :cause in Kernel) will be converted to a Hash, stringified, then used as the message

I do not know if #raise was intended to have such complicated behavior and the docs were not updated or if this is a implementation bug. The inconsistent behavior between message and backtrace and the implicit Hashification of kwargs leads me to believe that this is a bug. If a core committer can confirm this is not intentional, I would be happy to submit an issue to the bug tracker. There perhaps we can have a more productive conversation about whether to fix this or keep it as is an update the docs.

EDIT: Just found another possible signature (5)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points. Begin by comparing the existing RBS signatures for Kernel, Thread, and Fiber#raise with Ruby 3.2.2 behavior and the official documentation; done means resolving whether the behavior or documentation is authoritative and making the signatures consistent with that decision.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.