From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-11-29T00:41:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby needs continuations...

MonkeeSage wrote:
> You actually need a generator, which can be implemented with
> continuations, but doesn't have to be (in 1.9 the generators are
> implemented with threads -- have a look at generator.rb in 1.8 and 1.9
> to see the differences). Using generators, you can implement izip (and
> all of itertools if you'd like, though most of it already has
> equivalent ruby solutions). Here is a pretty close translation of the
> python given in the itertools docs:

Ruby 1.9 also moves continuations out of core, but provides a form of 
bounded continuations (coroutines) that's possible to implement in JRuby:

require 'fiber'
f = Fiber.new { a = 1; while true; Fiber.yield a; a += 1; end }
5.times { puts f.resume }

$ jruby -J-Djruby.compat.version=ruby1_9 fiber_example.rb
1
2
3
4
5

Under JRuby, it's using a native thread per live Fiber, so it's heavier 
than in Ruby 1.9 which uses green threads. However they'll actually run 
in parallel on JRuby, so that's a benefit. JRuby also supports a thread 
pool in 1.1 that helps blunt the cost of spinning up native threads.

- Charlie