Async Ruby VS Ruby on Rails

The Async gem is the natural successor, It's actively maintained, and allows you write synchronous code is if it wasn't non-blocking, and most libraries don't need any special support for Async (exceptions are gems with C extensions that do I/O and DB libraries with connection pooling that would otherwise be thread-based).

https://github.com/socketry/async uses coroutines and I think in general it’s been a great model with very few downsides in practice.

There's async I/O. Here's a library that leans on Ruby 3's fiber scheduler.

Hey folks, wanted to show this off and get feedback. Still early/experimental but there are quite a few concepts I'm excited about here. This project came about while writing a program in Go and loving its approach to concurrency. Being a long-time Rubyist I immediately started to think about what similar concepts might look like in Ruby.

I set out with two main design constraints:

1. Lightweight: I didn't want routines to be backed by fibers or threads. Having been involved some in the async project (https://github.com/socketry/async), I had some experience using fibers for concurrency but was curious if they could be avoided.

2. Explicitness: Routine behavior must be written to describe exactly how it is to behave. I always felt like concurrent code was hard to fully understand because of the indirection involved. On the spectrum between tedium and magical I wanted to err more on the side of tedium with Goru.

Goru routines are just blocks that are called once for every tick of the reactor. It is up to the developer to implement behavior in terms of a state machine, where on each tick the routine takes some action and then updates the state of the routine for the next tick. This fulfills both design constraints:

1. Because routines are just blocks, they weigh in at about ~345 bytes of memory overhead.

2. Routine behavior is explicit because it is written as a state machine inside the block.

Couple more features worth noting:

* Goru includes channels for buffered reading/writing (similar to channels in Go).

* Goru ships with primitives for non-blocking IO to easily build things like http servers.

Curious your thoughts!

For those who are interested here is the question.

Welcome! Ruby isn't exactly "dying", but the hype/popularity is definitely fading. This is primarily because Ruby is no longer "new", most of Ruby's popularity came from Rails, and now Rails is no longer the "new hotness". However, Ruby still has lots of awesome features and lots of awesome other libraries and frameworks, such as the new fancy irb gem that uses reline, nokogiri, chunky_png, the async gems, Dragon Ruby, SciRuby, Ronin, and the new Hanami web framework.

In Github, there is a Async Gem(https://github.com/socketry/async).

Industry adoption - Without including the adoption of other popular and more established frameworks like Python, React, C#, and others, if we consider the adoption of Ruby frameworks, Rails easily eclipses Hanami. The Rails homepage lists some big-name organizations using the framework. On the other hand, as the new kid on the block, Hanami is not so widely adopted. We'll have to wait and see whether that will change in the future.

on April 23, 2024, a PR #51640 was merged into main branch of Ruby On Rails. This PR title is Use Module#include rather than prepend for faster method lookup.

[0] is a my favorite demonstration of it.

[0]: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...

Here's a real life example: Imagine a Ruby on Rails app on which a team of developers are working. The code is hosted on GitLab and all the work is coordinated using GitLab issues. In other words: For every commit, there's an associated issue and the issue number acts as a sort of primary key for documentation, time reporting and so forth. This convention has a few advantages, most notably the ability to easily learn more about how, when and by whom features were implemented as well as how this implementation came to be.

Ruby on Rails is regarded as one of the best ruby frameworks. It was the primary language in developing big projects such as Twitter and helped the language boost the community. Often referred to as “Rails,” Ruby on Rails is a web development framework with an MVC control structure and currently running its 6.1 version. The 16-year-old language has dramatically influenced the web development structures and managing databases, web pages, and other components on a web application.

In Rails 7.1, a new option _instance_methods is introduced, allowing developers to opt-out of the automatic generation of instance methods for enums. When enum is defined with _instance_methods: false, Rails will no longer generate methods like pending?, processed?, etc.

Rails isn't super opinionated about database writes, its mostly left up to developers to discover that for relational DBs you do not want to be doing a bunch of small writes all at once.

That said it specifically has tools to address this that started appearing a few years ago https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/35077

The way my team handles it is to stick Kafka in between whats generating the records (for us, a bunch of web scraping workers) and and a consumer that pulls off the Kafka queue and runs an insert when its internal buffer reaches around 50k rows.

Rails is also looking to add some more direct background type work with https://github.com/basecamp/solid_queue but this is still very new - most larger Rails shops are going to be running a second system and a gem called Sidekiq that pulls jobs out of Redis.

I'm looking forward to see what extractions from this will land on rails. For example: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/50454

Here is what strict_loading does (source):

Kamal is a wonderfully simple way to deploy your applications anywhere. It will also be included by default in Rails 8. Kamal is trivial, but I don’t recommend using it on your development machine.