Project

nio4r

9.65
A long-lived project that still receives updates
New IO for Ruby
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
 Dependencies
 Project Readme

nio4r

Development Status

New I/O for Ruby (nio4r): cross-platform asynchronous I/O primitives for scalable network clients and servers. Modeled after the Java NIO API, but simplified for ease-of-use.

nio4r provides an abstract, cross-platform stateful I/O selector API for Ruby. I/O selectors are the heart of "reactor"-based event loops, and monitor multiple I/O objects for various types of readiness, e.g. ready for reading or writing.

Projects using nio4r

  • ActionCable: Rails 5 WebSocket protocol, uses nio4r for a WebSocket server
  • Celluloid: Actor-based concurrency framework, uses nio4r for async I/O
  • Async: Asynchronous I/O framework for Ruby
  • Puma: Ruby/Rack web server built for concurrency

Goals

  • Expose high-level interfaces for stateful IO selectors
  • Keep the API small to maximize both portability and performance across many different OSes and Ruby VMs
  • Provide inherently thread-safe facilities for working with IO objects

Supported platforms

Supported backends

  • libev: MRI C extension targeting multiple native IO selector APIs (e.g epoll, kqueue)
  • Java NIO: JRuby extension which wraps the Java NIO subsystem
  • Pure Ruby: Kernel.select-based backend that should work on any Ruby interpreter

Documentation

Please see the nio4r wiki for more detailed documentation and usage notes:

  • Getting Started: Introduction to nio4r's components
  • Selectors: monitor multiple IO objects for readiness events
  • Monitors: control interests and inspect readiness for specific IO objects
  • Byte Buffers: fixed-size native buffers for high-performance I/O

See also:

Non-goals

nio4r is not a full-featured event framework like EventMachine or Cool.io. Instead, nio4r is the sort of thing you might write a library like that on top of. nio4r provides a minimal API such that individual Ruby implementers may choose to produce optimized versions for their platform, without having to maintain a large codebase.

Releases

Bump the version first:

bundle exec bake gem:release:version:patch

CRuby

rake clean
rake release

JRuby

You might need to delete Gemfile.lock before trying to bundle install.

# Ensure you have the correct JDK:
pacman -Syu jdk-openjdk
archlinux-java set java-19-openjdk

# Ensure you are using jruby:
chruby jruby
bundle update

# Build the package:
rake clean
rake compile
rake release