From: Phil Tomson <rubyfan@...>
Date: 2006-05-28T05:33:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Threads...

On 5/27/06, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov <ara.t.howard@noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Sat, 27 May 2006, ReggW wrote:
>
> > Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
> >
> >> It seems to me that Ruby's green-thread implementation is perfectly
> >> adequate
> >> for most programmers' requirements.
> >
> > But the problem is that it doesn't take advantage of these new multi-core
> > processor that are now starting to become the standard machines being sold
> > (at least for my customers).
>
> it's a small problem.  here is some code which starts two processes, three if
> you count the parent.  both run in separate processes using drb as the ipc
> layer to make the communication painless.  because the code uses drb the com is
> simple.  because it uses multiple processes it allows the kernel to migrate
> them to different cpus.  the cost is about 100 lines of pure-ruby (the slave
> lib).  notice how easy it is for parent to communicate with child and for
> childrent to communicate with each other:
>
>      harp:~ > cat a.rb
>      require 'slave'
>      require 'yaml'
>
>      class ProcessA
>        def initialize(b) @b = b end
>        def process(n) @b.process(n * n) end
>        def pid() Process.pid end
>      end
>
>      class ProcessB
>        def process(n) n + 6 end
>        def pid() Process.pid end
>      end
>
>      b = Slave.new(ProcessB.new).object
>      a = Slave.new(ProcessA.new(b)).object
>
>      y 'a.pid' => a.pid
>      y 'b.pid' => b.pid
>
>      y 'answer' => a.process(6)
>
>
>      harp:~ > ruby a.rb
>      ---
>      a.pid: 15142
>      ---
>      b.pid: 15141
>      ---
>      answer: 42
>
>
> this is one of those things that allows one to consider designs that would be
> untenable in other languages.  obviously using this approach it would be
> trivial to setup a job that spawned 16 intercommunicating proccess, something
> which would be absurd to code in c.
>

Is your Slave code available?  (perhaps someone asked later; I miss
the newsgroup where I would be able to more easily tell if they did )

BTW: Just curious: Why are you require'ing Yaml?  Are you marshalling
in Drb with Yaml instead of the builtin marshalling?  If so, why?  Is
it faster?  (I wouldn't think so)

Phil

I really miss the gateway...