From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-07-30T13:33:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Concurrent Ruby?

On Tuesday 29 July 2008 12:13:53 ara.t.howard wrote:
> 
> On Jul 29, 2008, at 10:00 AM, David Masover wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to figure out how to at least partly duplicate the semantic
> > advantage in Ruby, but it's not easy -- I'm stuck either #freeze-ing
> > everything, or wrapping every message in an actor of its own, and both
> > approaches seem more obnoxious and error-prone than forcing the  
> > developer to
> > deal with it.
> 
> fan out multiple processes with a message queue each - easy to do with  
> drb.

That implies a full copy (I think), which isn't always what's needed.

Without actually testing your implementation, what happens when I send, say, a 
reference to an actor? (Kind of an essential feature.)

And without actually doing any benchmarks (how's that for naive?), I still 
find it hard to believe that DRb+Queue would scale better than Thread+Queue, 
for large numbers of actors. (Keep in mind, it's not unusual for an Erlang 
program to have thousands of processes.)

Given that I still have a vague hope that YARV will eventually remove the GIL, 
I'd rather stick to Threads, if I can make them safe.