Re: Fibers in Ruby 1.9?

On 8/23/07, [e-mail] <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Ko1 says (on the coroutines thread, I think) that Fibers are best thought
> of
> as semi-coroutines, like Python generators.  He's considering changing the
> name to avoid confusion with microthreads.



Out of ignorance I thought that "Fibers" were going to be a wrapper over the
Microsoft system object with the same name, but now I see that the desire is
to create a different kind of "thread" that gets scheduled manually by the
programmer. In a way it's back to the future because Netware NLMs had to be
programmed like this, and every Posix library allows you to specify this
threading discipline, which once upon a time was commonly used.

I can see the attractiveness of this model because you can write some very
elegant programs with it.

There are two somewhat similar things I'll mention without elaborating
(because they don't really belong on this thread): deferreds from Python's
Twisted, and Erlang's processes.

Deferreds are conceptually somewhat weird. But I've used them extensively in
Ruby (EventMachine's Deferrable class) and they work surprisingly well.