Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bhuga 2766 days ago
> We show that fibers require minimal changes to existing application code and are thus a good approach for retrofitting existing systems.

I disagree that 'minimal changes to existing code' is a good goal for a Ruby parallelism solution. The large Ruby codebases I have dealt with have gigantic hacks to get around the GIL: complex fork management systems, subprocess management, crazy load-this-but-not-that systems for prefork memory management to optimize copy on write, and probably more. Parallel tasks in Ruby are a nightmare to work with.

Changing existing code _should_ be a goal of any Ruby parallelism solution. If we can't get rid of this kind of cruft, what are we even doing?

I still love Ruby, but I want go-style channels, not apologies for the GIL.
1 comments
olivierlacan 2766 days ago
That’s the plan with Guilds: http://www.atdot.net/~ko1/activities/2018_rubyconf2018.pdf

These are the slides for Koichi Sasada’s RubyConf 2018 (last week) talk updating the community on his progress in the design and implementation of Guilds.

Surprising that the author isn’t aware of this planned CRuby feature announced in 2016. I wrote about it then: https://olivierlacan.com/posts/concurrency-in-ruby-3-with-gu...

Take this with a grain of salt of course because the design has clearly changed since then and I need to upgrade my post or do a follow-up.

link
ioquatix 2766 days ago
Hi, I'm the author, I'm also a Ruby core committer, and yes I'm aware of Guilds. The are a model for parallelism and don't really affect concurrency at all. At best, they provide a 3rd option on top of processes/threads/guilds.
link
olivierlacan 2765 days ago
That makes sense. Sorry for the assumption.

Guilds felt omitted in your post since they (should) address one of the points you make about the usability/ergonomics of existing Ruby APIs for managing non-sequential execution.

But it’s definitely a bit early to tell what Guilds will actually look like as a final product.

link
ioquatix 2763 days ago
Guilds are just a fancy name for threads or processes at this point. What they ultimately end up being is yet to be seen :)
link