From: Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@...>
Date: 2008-02-12T09:00:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Actors and Concurrency

(others can get more specific here, but here's the general idea)

First of all, Ruby does not have concurrency. Not even 1.9 allows
concurrently running threads. The Ruby VM is a preemptive kernel.
Eventually Ruby's threads will be system threads *and* fully
concurrent, but that's a long time from now.

Second, Actors aren't really threads or Fibers. There's a single
"dispatcher" thread/process/whatever that handles sending out events
to the pool of actors. So while Actors may look like threads and
concurrency, they aren't.

So put the two together, and you're going to get sequential code execution.

Jason

On Feb 11, 2008 6:18 PM, fedzor <fedzor@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I was messing with actors today, and I found that I couldn't get
> an actor to run concurrently with the main thread. Am I just wishing
> fibers are something they're not?
>
> I had:
>
> Actor.spawn
>    sleep 1
>    puts 5
> end
>
> puts 6
>
> and it went:
> 5
> 6
>
> So what do I have to do to get Actors to go concurrent on my ass? I
> was hoping for:
> 6
> 5
>
> Thanks,
> Ari
> --------------------------------------------|
> If you're not living on the edge,
> then you're just wasting space.
>
>
>
>