[ruby-core:36015] [Ruby 1.9 - RubySpec #4649] Adding parallel constructors to Ruby 2.0

Issue #4649 has been updated by Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas.


You're right Joel. Maybe the syntax I'm requesting to be included in standard Ruby should be something like:

concurrently do
  task {...}
  ...
end

But, although the implementation is simple, having a standard idiom for that common requirement would be great. That means I wouldn't have to redefine this idiom not to rely on external gem while doing some scripting... Other than that, making it a language feature could allow some low level improvements in performance, but it is just a guess since I don't know how this could be achieved yet.

Furthermore, depending on the specs, maybe it wouldn't be necessary to do something like "a, b = concurrently do...". Being a standard idiom, someone looking at a code like this would know for sure what is happening since it is a language feature instead of an external dependency...

Also, my initial example was too simple, but I imagine possibly several variables inside each task that should be available at the end of the parallels/concurrently block.
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RubySpec #4649: Adding parallel constructors to Ruby 2.0
http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/4649

Author: Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: Yukihiro Matsumoto
Category: 
Target version: 2.0


I was not sure if this was RubySpec or Feature type.

My request is to create some new syntax for easing the write of concurrent code with Ruby. The syntax could be something like this:

parallels do
  task "get response from service A" do # optional description
    a = IO.read("http://serviceA/request")
  end
  task { b = get_response_from_service_b }
end

# at this point both tasks have finish, it's like a join in the threads at the end of the parallel block.
call_another_service_that_depends_on(a and b)

I am not sure, though, how to deal with scopes inside the parallel block. Traditionally in Ruby, this wouldn't work because both 'a' and 'b' would be local to the 'task' block and would not be accessible from the outside of the parallel block. If we don't want instance variables, I don't know what is the best approach for avoiding some "a=nil; b=nil" before the parallel block.

Maybe this could start as a gem, but having it implemented directly in Ruby would be awesome, specially for scripts that usually don't rely in external dependencies for simplifying distribution...

Any thoughts about this propose?


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