Concurrently

Concurrently is a concurrency framework for Ruby and mruby built upon fibers. With it code can be evaluated independently in its own execution context similar to a thread. Execution contexts are called evaluations in Concurrently and are created with Kernel#concurrently:

hello = concurrently do
  wait 0.2 # seconds
  "hello"
end

world = concurrently do
  wait 0.1 # seconds
  "world"
end

puts "#{hello.await_result} #{world.await_result}"

In this example we have three evaluations: The root evaluation and two more concurrent evaluations started by said root evaluation. The root evaluation waits until both concurrent evaluations were concluded and then prints "hello world".

Synchronization with events

Evaluations can be synchronized with certain events by waiting for them. These events are:

an elapsed time period (Kernel#wait),
readability and writability of IO (IO#await_readable, IO#await_writable) and
the result of another evaluation (Concurrently::Proc::Evaluation#await_result).

Since evaluations run independently they are not blocking other evaluations while waiting.

Concurrent I/O

When doing I/O it is important to do it non-blocking. If the IO object is not ready use IO#await_readable and IO#await_writable to await readiness.

For more about non-blocking I/O, see the core ruby docs for IO#read_nonblock and IO#write_nonblock.

This is a little server reading from an IO and printing the received messages:

# Let's start with creating a pipe to connect client and server
r,w = IO.pipe

# Server:
# We let the server code run concurrently so it runs independently. It reads
# from the pipe non-blocking and awaits readability if the pipe is not readable.
concurrently do
  while true
    begin
      puts r.read_nonblock 32
    rescue IO::WaitReadable
      r.await_readable
      retry
    end
  end
end

# Client:
# The client writes to the pipe every 0.5 seconds
puts "#{Time.now.strftime('%H:%M:%S.%L')} (Start time)"
while true
  wait 0.5
  w.write Time.now.strftime('%H:%M:%S.%L')
end

The root evaluation is effectively blocked by waiting or writing messages. But since the server runs concurrently it is not affected by this and happily prints its received messages.

This is the output:

23:20:42.357 (Start time)
23:20:42.858
23:20:43.359
23:20:43.860
23:20:44.360
...

Documentation

Supported Ruby Versions

Ruby 2.2.7+
mruby 1.3+

Development

Release Notes

License

Concurrently is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please see the file called LICENSE.

concurrently