[ANN] Actors for Ruby: The Omnibus Concurrency Library 0.1

ruby-talk
1

With all the recent interest in Erlang, I've decided to bump up the
release schedule of my Omnibus Concurrency Library. It provides a
Ruby-esque implementation of actors, as well as a few other concurrency
approaches (data-parallel programming and futures, to begin with).

This first release is a very rough cut, featuring an MRI port of the
Actors implementation I wrote for the Rubinius core. I'm afraid there's
no documentation yet, so I'll give some brief examples:

require 'concurrent/actors'
include Concurrent::Actors

RequestGreeting = Struct.new :reply_to
Greeting = Struct.new :value

# spawning a new actor
oracle = Actor.spawn do
   greeting = "Hello"
   loop do
     # guarded receive (does case-like matching via #===)
     Actor.receive do |f|
       f.when Greeting do |m|
         greeting = m.value.dup.freeze
       end
       # callback part 1
       f.when RequestGreeting do |m|
         m.reply_to << Greeting[greeting]
       end
     end
   end
end

# sending a message to an actor
oracle << Greeting["Howdy"]

# getting a reference to the current actor
current = Actor.current

# callback part 2
oracle << RequestGreeting[current]
Actor.receive do |f|
   f.when Greeting do |m|
     puts "#{ m.value }, Bill!"
   end
end

Linked processes, distributed actors, and possible integration with
Erlang/Erlectricity are planned for the future.

The Omnibus Concurrency Library is available via RubyGems as the
"concurrent" gem, and downloads are also available from the RubyForge
download page:

  http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=3690

-mental