On Apr 21, 2010, at 8:49 AM, Pieter Hintjens wrote: > On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:33 PM, Martin Sustrik <sust...@imatix.com> wrote: > >> Ruby is basically a single OS thread + green Ruby threads, right? > > Language != implementation of language. > > See here > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/56087/does-ruby-have-real-multithreading > > 11 different runtimes (not 20 as I remembered). JRuby is the only one > (according to the article) with true threads.
Wow, that stackoverflow response is OLD. At this point in time, there are only 7 ruby runtimes that get any attention and are usable in a production setting. 1. MRI 1.8.x Green threads 2. MRI 1.9.x Native threads with a GIL 3. JRuby (implements both 1.8 and 1.9 syntax) Native threads or green (JVM dependent) 4. Rubinius Native threads with a GIL (The answer in stackoverflow is way out of date on this one.) 5. MacRuby Native threads with a GIL 6. IronRuby Native on Win32 7. MagLev This is built on top of the GemStone Smalltalk application server. If it is threaded then MagLev will be too. I haven't done a side-by-side comparison yet but I would *guess* that MRI 1.9.x will run 0MQ without the same problems as MRI 1.8.x. I wouldn't recommend MRI 1.8.x at all for any new projects; MRI 1.9.x is very solid and is where *all* new code development is happening for C Ruby. The 1.8.x branch is in maintenance mode. BTW, the GIL (giant interpreter lock) used by many of these runtimes does *not* prevent C extensions from spawning as many threads as they want or need. All it does is serialize all access from the C extension back into the interpreter. Therefore, many threads *can* run simultaneously but only one can call back into ruby at any given time. That said, I think JRuby will be fine but it will have JNI overhead. Perhaps I'll contribute some FFI bindings to 0MQ so it is usable (new weekend project). cr _______________________________________________ zeromq-dev mailing list zeromq-dev@lists.zeromq.org http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev
