Async Ruby VS falcon

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).

Could you command on any projects within Shopify that are helping Ruby's concurrency story? I'm aware of Ractors (https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/master/ractor_md.html) and Fibers, but it's unclear to how feasible these primitives currently are to build the necessary abstractions on top of them that would make Rails more concurrent.

https://github.com/socketry/falcon is an interesting project, but again, it's not clear how difficult it would be deploying a Rails app on top of this.

There's a lot of really great projects happening and plenty to be hopeful about, but when that stuff will land or the changes the rest of the community and ecosystem should think about making still isn't clear.

HOWEVER HAD, not all of these problems (in Java) are due to some corporation going bulldozer-mode. Several problems seem to come primarily from bad technical decisions. The import-situation annoys me in Java. I think it is really bad that I can not easily require add-ons or files, without being forced into a specific, nonsensical directory structure. In ruby I just do require, or load (I could do require_relative but this is a pretty pointless addition; It even leads to bugs such as the author of https://github.com/socketry/falcon assuming that everyone uses a hardcoded filesystem, so code such as https://github.com/socketry/falcon/blob/main/bin/falcon at: require_relative '../lib/falcon/command' not working unless the assumption that the directory BELOW the bin/ one must contain a lib/ which is not always the case. I am not sure he understood the problem domain though. If he would have simply used require instead, that would not be an issue, but no, he thinks one has to use hardcoded path assumptions into require_relative, which means it'll break when you relocatethe bin/ executable file there. It's trivial to fix of course, just replace the require_relative with require, but I think he did not understand the explanation so ...)

This doesn't have much to do with Rails, more with the web server that serves the Rails app. Take a look at Falcon.

You can use the Async gem and the Falcon web server to take advantage of this capability. And starting in Ruby 3.0, async I/O is even more automatic because inside the Ruby runtime, all socket operations will automatically yield the current fiber by default. It’s fully transparent to the developer. Your I/O calls appear to be blocking so they are easy to understand, consistent with Ruby’s “programmer happiness” philosophy.

There seem to a lot of ruby pieces falling into place for Rails 7.

The Achilles Heel of Hotwire apps has previously been the low number of supported websocket connections and high memory usage when using ActionCable and Puma but I have high hopes that Falcon[1] will take care of that.

That along with Github's View Components[2] and Tailwind make me really please with the way Rails is heading right now.

1. https://github.com/socketry/falcon

2. https://github.com/github/view_component

This is all new to me as well, but the project mentioned the Falcon web server(https://github.com/socketry/falcon).

The documentation for Falcon mentions using it with rails: https://socketry.github.io/falcon/guides/rails-integration/i...

I imagine something more "native" to rails will happen eventually though. But would need to be after this makes its way into core ruby(which has not happened yet apparently).

Welcome back.

It's still the best choice in the Ruby world, well maintained, responsive and new features added. Shopify and github use it, you might want to look at the Rails 6 annoucements what these companies added for scalability features. There've been changes to the asset pipeline since version 3 but you'll still recognize it. You can run Rails as API-only and there's subprojects/tutorials for combining a frontend-heavy React,Vue with a Rails backend. You can still ignore the webpack based asset setup unless you use React,Vue I think. Ruby-3 works fine though I'm still waiting for some less-maintained gems to finally merge PRs, maybe you want to use Ruby-2.7 first.

I use https://puma.io/ , that scales well enough for me. https://github.com/socketry/falcon#readme is faster with build-in HTTP/2 support but harder to setup in my opinion, e.g. requires SSL certificate even on localhost.