From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-07-26T05:35:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and threads (Sydney)

In article <dc3e8b0267u@enews4.newsguy.com>,
Phil Tomson <ptkwt@aracnet.com> wrote:
>In article <51266.66.192.236.118.1122291266.squirrel@devsea.com>,
>John Wells <lists@sourceillustrated.com> wrote:
>>Guys,
>>
>>Was looking through the forums at ruby-ide.com when I noticed the
>>following comment:
>>
>>"Unfortunately i can't use ruby for scripting/extending/implementing as
>>ruby does not work with multiple native threads and i already have one
>>ruby thread that is doing the background parsing."
>>
>>Can anyone elaborate on this?  How does it effect folks developing in
>>Ruby, and curiously, why does Python seem to support it and Ruby doesn't?
>>
>
>It's because there are a lot of globals defined in the Ruby interpreter so 
>it's not threadable (native threadable, that is).
>
>However, recently there have been some interesting developments with an 
>experimental Ruby interpreter called Sydney.  Here's a quote from the 
>weblog page where it was announced:
>
> "Sydney is an experimental fork of 1.8.2 that adds a number of features, 
> such as:
>
>    * Native OS Threads (Thread::OS). These do not replace the normal 
> Threads, and allow for MxN thread setups (see 
> test/sydney/test_osthread.rb#test_mxn). There is a lot to be said about 
> these, so lets move on for now.
> ...
>
> In getting OS threads implement, the core of the interpretter has been 
> modified to be reentrant and thread-safe, allowing mulitple threads to 
> run concurrently.
>
> All globals have been cleaned up and moved into a unified ruby_state 
> struct (accessable directly in the form of Ruby::State objects). "
>
>This way you can get the best of both worlds - Ruby's current 
>cross-platform 'green' threads and native threads if you need them.  I 
>hope that this makes it back into the 'official' Ruby interpreter.
>
>


Ooops.  Forgot to include a link to Sydney:

http://blog.fallingsnow.net/articles/category/Sydney

Phil