Does ruby call initialize method automatically?

Question

Do I need to explicitly initialize an object if an initialize method is included in class definition?

Answer 1

It depends on your definition of "explicit". Usually you need to, even if there are no arguments:

object = MyClass.new(...)

In some cases there are factory methods that produce instances you can use, creating a form of implicit initialization:

object = MyClass.factory_method(...)

This would have the effect of calling MyObject.new internally.

There are some libraries which have rather unusual method signatures, like:

object = MyClass(...)
object = MyClass[...]

The effect is the same, as these might look odd but are just method calls.