Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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QCon San Francisco
Nov 19-21:
+ 80 sessions & tracks
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JProbe Freeware,
an Eclipse plug-in,
diagnoses
memory issues
quickly & easily.
Brian Goetz discusses the difficulties of creating multithreaded programs correctly, incorrect synchronization, race conditions, deadlock, Software Transactional Memory, the history of concurrency, alternatives to threads, Erlang, Scala, and recommendations for concurrency in Java.
"FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby" is a new book about the FXRuby GUI library. InfoQ talked to the book's author Lyle Johnson. Also: an InfoQ-exclusive sample chapter from the book.
With Erlang popularizing Actors, Rubinius adding its Multi-VM, and Ruby 1.9 adding another concurrency primitive with Fibers (Coroutines), a lot of things are going on in the Ruby concurrency world. So we interviewed MenTaLguY, who works on Rubinius, JRuby and many aspects of concurrency in the Ruby world.
Work is going on to make Rails 2.2 be thread safe - we look at what's been done. Also: ETags support has been added to Rails Edge.
Research on the topic of Multiple VM (MVM) Ruby will be conducted at the University of Tokyo together with Sun's JRuby team. The work will investigate issues such as communication between VMs and a common API across all Ruby implementations, with solutions provided initially for Ruby and JRuby.
A JDJ article explains that as we move towards Multi-Core processor architectures, single threaded performance improvement is likely to see a significant slowdown over the next one to three years. In some cases, single-thread performance may even drop. This in turn will require software developers change the way we develop software, increasing our utilization of parallel execution architectures.
Fibers were recently in the Ruby 1.9 branch. The Coroutine-like concept has many uses, such as implementing lightweight concurrency and others. We look at the concept and influences of Fibers in Ruby 1.9, as well as code samples.
Ruby's thread system is about to undergo big changes in Ruby 1.9, possibly moving from user space threads to kernel threads. Or not. A recent interview with Matz and Sasada Koichi shows some new ideas that are considered. We take a look at the different possible future Ruby threading systems.
Are Ruby 1.x User-space threads a hindrance with writing GUIs? We take a brief look at the situation and show the situation, options and alternatives such as using JRuby.
