From: Vlad GALU <dudu@...>
Date: 2007-01-19T16:35:39+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] fastthread 0.6.2

On 1/19/07, MenTaLguY <mental@rydia.net> wrote:
> It looks like I got too creative in 0.6.1 and consequently ran afoul of
> a bug in the Ruby interpreter.  0.6.2 works around the bug and should be
> entirely stable at this point.
>
> Thanks to Young Hyun for his help in coming up with test cases.
>
> == what?
>
> fastthread is a Ruby library which provides a faster (and
> non-memory-leaking) C implementation of the concurrency primitives from
> stdlib's thread.rb.  It aims to be 100% compatible with thread.rb's
> public API.

   Any reasons for not including it in the standard ruby library?

> So, how much faster?  In the single-threaded case, fastthread's version
> of Mutex#lock and Mutex#synchronize are comparable in performance to
> Thread.critical= and Thread.exclusive.  With multiple threads, it has an
> additional advantage over Thread.critical in that entering a critical
> section doesn't suspend any other threads unless they're competing for
> the same lock.  (Compare that to Thread.critical, which stops all other
> threads dead!)
>
> I know a lot of folks have been avoiding stdlib's Mutex because all the
> method calls killed performance.  But no more, with fastthread!  Why use
> Thread.critical when you can use the real thing?
>
> == how?
>
> Simply require 'fastthread' in addition to 'thread'.  If you want to
> make fastthread optional (recommended!), do it this way:
>
>         require 'thread'
>         begin
>           require 'fastthread'
>         rescue LoadError
>         end
>
> This way, your program will still work on systems that don't have (or
> don't need -- e.g. JRuby) fastthread, but you still get a performance
> boost on systems where it's available.
>
> == where?
>
> Gem:
> http://moonbase.rydia.net/software/optimized-locking/fastthread-0.6.2.gem
>
> Tarball:
> http://moonbase.rydia.net/software/optimized-locking/fastthread-0.6.2.tgz
>
> fastthread is also available on Rubyforge (and therefore the main gems
> repository), courtesy of the Mongrel project:
>
> https://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1306
>
> -mental
>
>
>


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