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.

I think that you're conflating correlation with causation. I think it's more plausible to assume it was the early numbers that are skewed and non-representative.

The fact that GitHub itself was is a killer app of the Ruby on Rails, and that the Rails project itself changed to being hosted on GitHub somewhat very early on it's history [1] had a disproportionate effect on the early community that gathered there.

Now GitHub attracts a much more diverse portfolio of projects, so the numbers you see there are less statistically biased towards early Ruby on Rails adopters.

[1] Commit history on the main branch of rails/rails via github goes as far as Apr 10, 2008 https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/c67e985994362290308073...

Done! https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/50295

releaseCycle: "6.1" releaseDate: 2020-12-09 eol: 2024-06-01 # https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/46895#issuecomment-1673353127 latest: "6.1.7.6" latestReleaseDate: 2023-08-22

You might have luck. It does look like docs changes are being accepted into 7.1-stable branch: https://github.com/rails/rails/commits/7-1-stable/

Also this doesn't show how database access is handled which is the hard part. If you are not touching the database, you can run Rails on falcon and get fiber based concurrency.

If you run falcon on rails and access database, then you have to explicitly checkin/checkout a connection to be safe. Details here - https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/42271.

DEV is a Rails monolith, which uses Preact in the front-end using islands architecture. The reason why I mention all this is that it's not a full-stack JavaScript application, and there is no state management library like Redux or Zustand in use. The data store, for the most part on the front end, is all data attributes.

I made a PR to fix it, but this may take some time to get merged. Meanwhile I released a gem which can be used straight away: https://github.com/reclaim-the-stack/actioncable-enhanced-postgresql-adapter/

1. You are correct for upload, but not for download. Looks like rails 7 added support for presigned urls: https://blog.saeloun.com/2021/09/14/rails-7-adds-expiring-ur...

2. CDN support is via monkey patch: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/44136

3. yep

4. yep