Celluloid VS Polyphony

Speaking as someone who has used Erlang longer than most, who created a pre-Elixir-like language for Erlang's BEAM VM, and who routinely listens to Carl Hewitt's rants about why Erlang actors are bad, and who tried to make a Ruby actor library after using innumerable other library-level actor solutions...

Celluloid

When using green threads/fibers/coroutines, an interesting technique to make signal handling safer is to run the signal handler asynchronously on a separate fiber/green thread. That way most of the problems of dealing with signals go away, and there's basically no limitation on what you can do inside the signal handler.

I've successfully used this technique in Polyphony [1], a fiber-based Ruby gem for writing concurrent programs. When a signal occurs, Polyphony creates a special-purpose fiber that runs the signal handling code. The fiber is put at the head of the run queue, and is resumed once the currently executed fiber yields control.

[1] https://github.com/digital-fabric/polyphony

Read the release notes here: https://github.com/orgs/digital-fabric/discussions/110 The Polyphony docs: https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/polyphony The Polyphony repository: https://github.com/digital-fabric/polyphony

Polyphony is a gem for building highly-concurrent Ruby programs. It utilizes Ruby fibers to provide a high-performance safe environment for launching any number of concurrent operations. Under the hood, Polyphony employs io_uring to maximize I/O performance (libev is used on platforms other than recent Linux kernels).

Is monkey-patching inherently bad? Should its use make Polyphony illegitimate? These are the questions I'm exploring in my latest article.

how is this diff from: https://github.com/digital-fabric/polyphony

Infinite loops are great for expressing long-running concurrent operations. In this article I’ll discuss the use of infinite loops as a major construct when writing concurrent apps in Ruby using Polyphony. I’ll show how infinite loops differ from normal, finite ones; how they can be used to express long-running tasks in a concurrent environment; and how they can be stopped. Read it now!

Polyphony is a library for writing highly concurrent Ruby apps. Polyphony harnesses Ruby fibers and a powerful io_uring-based I/O runtime to provide a solid foundation for building high-performance concurrent Ruby apps.

> Curious if there’s anything public about improving ruby performance from the I/O angle mentioned in the post.

I'm currently working on Polyphony [0], a Ruby gem for writing highly-concurrent Ruby apps. It uses Ruby fibers under the hood, and does I/O using io_uring (on Linux, there is also a libev-based backend).

[0] https://github.com/digital-fabric/polyphony