README

Summary

Represents forks (child processes) as objects and makes interaction with forks easy.

Features

Object oriented usage of forks
Easy-to-use implementation of future (Fork.future { computation }.call # => result)
Provides facilities for IO between parent and fork
Supports sending ruby objects to the forked process
Supports reading ruby objects from the forked process

Installation

gem install fork

Usage

An example using a future:

def fib(n) n < 2 ? n : fib(n-1)+fib(n-2); end # <-- bad implementation of fibonacci
future = Fork.future do
  fib(35)
end
# do something expensive in the parent process
puts future.call # this blocks, until the fork finished, and returns the last value

A more complex example, using some of Fork's features:

# Create a fork with two-directional IO, which returns values and raises
# exceptions in the parent process.
fork = Fork.new :to_fork, :from_fork do |fork|
  while received = fork.receive_object
    p :fork_received => received
  end
end
fork.execute # spawn child process and start executing
fork.send_object(123)
puts "Fork runs as process with pid #{fork.pid}"
fork.send_object(nil) # terminate the fork
fork.wait # wait until the fork is indeed terminated
puts "Fork is dead, as expected" if fork.dead?

License

You can use this code under the {file:LICENSE.txt BSD-2-Clause License}, free of charge. If you need a different license, please ask the author.