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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: It ain't easy being green
Feed Title: Testing 1,2,3...
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One of the "knocks" against Ruby is that its thread model is somewhat feeble, i.e. it uses "green" (select based) threads, but does not support "native" threads. That means no SMP support.
But is native thread support all its cracked up to be? James Robertson has been following the likes of Tim Bray for some interesting discussion on the subject, including mentions of JRuby. Here are some links of interest, which in turn include other useful links and comments:
The gist of the overall conversation seems to be that native threads aren't all they're cracked up to be because they're more expensive and most people aren't bright enough to use them anyway. Better to scale out, using multiple processes and interprocess communication, than scale up.
That being said, I'd still like native thread support in Ruby, especially on Windows, where the select based model has issues.
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