From: William Paulson <billpaulson@...>
Date: 2012-07-06T22:59:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Green threads in 1.9.* ?

"Green? I think perhaps this word does not mean what you think it means."

Perhaps this discussion would proceed more smoothly if we defined what's meant by a "green" thread, or avoided the term. Ruby programmers usually use the term "green threads" to mean implementations of Ruby's Thread class where the scheduling doesn't use OS support. These threads are otherwise middle-weight, akin to a Linux pthread. The expected use-case for Ruby Thread objects would usually have only a smallish number of objects, often approximating the number of cores in a server. For this sort of model, moving to an OS supported thread means that multicore parallelism is easier to achieve.

Rex, it sounds like the "green" threads you are thinking of may be a flyweight sort of object, where a program might have hundreds or thousands of entities. Threads of this type aren't usually supported by OS, so each language or application may support them, or not. Ruby Thread instances don't map well to this usage, independent of whether they use a "green" internal scheduler or  external OS scheduler.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 6, 2012, at 7:59 AM, Jam <jam@jamandbees.net> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Jul 6, 2012, at 6:40 AM, rex goxman <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
> 
>> Robert Klemme wrote in post #1067663:
>>> So far rex provides a solution he wants
>>> to use but I cannot really see the reasoning behind it.
>> 
>> *Sigh*.  I did not provide a "solution I want to use."  I provided a 
>> CRAPPY EXAMPLE off the top of my head that was advertised as a CRAPPY 
>> EXAMPLE before giving the CRAPPY EXAMPLE.
>> 
>> 
> 
> Hey Rex,
> 
> I think you misunderstood here. You said you wanted to use green threads as a solution but haven't stated a problem i.e. you stated the solution you want. 
> 
> I think there's a couple of different voices in this thread, but one recurring one is asking for your use case so that they can help come up with an alternate solution. It doesn't sound like you are looking for an alternate, though, just that you're surprised green threads were removed entirely.
> 
> 
> Jams
> 
> 
>