InfoQ Homepage Threading Content on InfoQ
-
Future of the Threading and Garbage Collection in Ruby - Interview with Koichi Sasada
InfoQ caught up with the creator of Ruby 1.9.x's VM Koichi Sasada to talk about what's coming for Ruby 1.9.2, the state of the Global Interpreter Lock (or Global VM Lock) and what it'll take to get a generational GC in 1.9.x.
-
Exploring Tuple Spaces Persistence In Ruby With Blackboard
Ruby has long been criticized for 1.8's limited green threads. Luc Castera gave a presentation at RubyNation about Concurrent Programming with Ruby and Tuple Spaces. He introduces 2 ways of implementing TupleSpaces in Ruby: Rinda and Blackboard using Redis (with plans to porting it to Erlang).
-
MacRuby Drops GIL, Gains Concurrent Threads
MacRuby joins the ranks of JRuby and IronRuby and moved away from Ruby 1.9's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in the experimental branch.
-
Rich Hickey on Clojure's Features and Implementation
In this interview from QCon London 2009, Rich Hickey talks about Clojure. The discussion includes the ideas behind Clojure's STM support, what other concurrency primitives Clojure supports and which ones might get added in the future. Other topics covered are Clojure's AOT support, the role and implementation of multimethods, Clojure ports to other systems and much more.
-
Performance Roundup: Heap Stacks Boost Threads in 1.8.x, MacRuby AOT, ZenProfile and EventHooks
New patches by Joe Damato improve the efficiency of Ruby 1.8.x's green threads with heap stacks: instead of copying the entire stack at every context switch, the patches actually switch between different stacks. Ryan Davis released zenprofile and event_hook for efficient profiling. Also: work on a MacRuby Ahead of Time compiler using LLVM has started.
-
Rails 2.2 Released: A Glance at New Features
After two release candidates, Rails 2.2 has been released. We take a look at some of the major new features and improvements.
-
Article: The Limits of Code Optimization: a new Singleton Pattern Implementation
The Java double-check singleton pattern is not thread safe and can’t be fixed. In this article, Dr. Alexey Yakubovich provides an implementation of the Singleton pattern that he claims is thread-safe.
-
Presentation: Concurrency: Past and Present
In this presentation from QCon London 2008, 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.
-
Rails Roundup: Rails 2.2 Will Be Threadsafe, ETags Support in Rails Edge
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.
-
Article: Do Java 6 threading optimizations actually work?
Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. But do they actually work? In this two part article, Jeroen Borgers explores these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.
-
Article: FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby
"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 about FXRuby's implementation, threading and more. Also: an InfoQ-exclusive sample chapter from the book.
-
Common Ruby MVM API research kicked off
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.
-
Article: Ruby Concurrency, Actors, and Rubinius - Interview with MenTaLguY
Actors, Fibers/Coroutines, Rubinius' Multi-VM and other Concurrency topics have come up recently. To put all these concepts into perspective, we talked to Ruby's MenTaLguY, who's been working on Ruby fastthread, Ruby Actors implementations, Rubinius, and much more. Also: a glimpse at MenTaLguY's next project.
-
The Software Architecture Impact of the Multi-Core Processor Trend
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.
-
Article: The Box: A Shortcut to finding Performance Bottlenecks
Quite often performance problems will be reported with some very antidotal comments that do nothing to help you understand where to start looking. Faced with this dilemma, it is not uncommon for teams to start guessing at the root cause. Now enter "the box", a little diagram that is an abstraction of a complete system. The box is a reminder of the true cases of performance bottlenecks.