From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-07-31T04:22:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Concurrent Ruby?

Tony Arcieri wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Kyle Murphy <kmurph79@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Apologies if this is a really stupid question, I am new to programming,
>> but after reading about Erlang and it's speed increase on multi-core
>> devices I had to ask.
>>
>> With Matz supposedly making Ruby 2.0 right now, is it possible to make
>> it concurrent like Erlang so as to take advantage of the future
>> multi-core devices?  Thank you.
>>
> 
> Rubinius is able to spawn a VM per CPU core, and allow quasi-Erlang style
> concurrency using Actor objects which can communicate across inter-VM
> message buses.
> 
> It's not as elegant as Erlang's SMP scheduler (something like that really
> isn't possible without a shared-nothing process architecture), but it more
> or less provides the same approach Erlang uses for distributed systems (i.e.
> each CPU is a "node")

It's worth mentioning JRuby also supports the MVM API, and sub-VMs share 
nothing with their parents save them message queue. Sub-VMs also are 
launched in their own native thread (though of course JRuby has native 
threads within a given VM as well). It wouldn't be much of a leap to 
implement the Actor model as well.

- Charlie