MacRuby Drops GIL, Gains Concurrent Threads(infoq.com)
infoq.com
MacRuby Drops GIL, Gains Concurrent Threads
http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/macruby-drops-gil-threading
5 comments
That's what I've heard about CPython's GIL, but no one has said why it slows down single threaded performance significantly. Do you happen to know?
I understand that finer-grain locking incurs more overhead, but if done well, it shouldn't be a huge performance hit. The Linux kernel at one point was protected by one, big kernel lock, too, and that was successfully relaxed.
I understand that finer-grain locking incurs more overhead, but if done well, it shouldn't be a huge performance hit. The Linux kernel at one point was protected by one, big kernel lock, too, and that was successfully relaxed.
Here's hoping that unladen-swallow succeeds as well.
A little more info in the mailing list status update:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]...
I like the Tcl approach a lot: one interpreter per thread, with message passing. That gets around the problem entirely, for a lot of things.
That's been possible in python for a long time using pyprocessing (part of the stdlib since 2.5 i think). No idea about ruby but don't they have something similar?
Neat.
It's too bad that MacRuby is wed to, uh Macs, as it is maturing pretty quickly. I assume that's because there is not much dissonance between the broader goals of Apple's approach to Obj-C and Ruby the language. I'd like to see a day where it isn't the bastard step-child of Ruby VM's, but I somehow doubt that will happen.
It's too bad that MacRuby is wed to, uh Macs, as it is maturing pretty quickly. I assume that's because there is not much dissonance between the broader goals of Apple's approach to Obj-C and Ruby the language. I'd like to see a day where it isn't the bastard step-child of Ruby VM's, but I somehow doubt that will happen.
I'd like to see a day where it isn't the bastard step-child of Ruby VM's, but I somehow doubt that will happen.
The JRuby guys have been saying the same thing about JRuby for a while :P
MacRuby will also be installable/runnable on non-mac systems too i hear (although i guess we'll see how far that gets as well)
The JRuby guys have been saying the same thing about JRuby for a while :P
MacRuby will also be installable/runnable on non-mac systems too i hear (although i guess we'll see how far that gets as well)
It only relies on Obj-C runtime, so it could conceivably run on any system.
Given the name though, I would surmise that is low priority for the developers.
Given the name though, I would surmise that is low priority for the developers.
I'm wondering if some of the OS X specific Frameworks have made it into the code...
That being said, the article didn't go into any detail at all. Perhaps these questions have been answered already. Either way, this is promising step for MacRuby.