Polyphony - Easy Concurrency for Ruby
Polyphony | pəˈlɪf(ə)ni | Music - the style of simultaneously combining a number of parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonizing with each other.
What is Polyphony
Polyphony is a library for building concurrent applications in Ruby. Polyphony harnesses the power of Ruby fibers to provide a cooperative, sequential coprocess-based concurrency model. Under the hood, Polyphony uses libev as a high-performance event reactor that provides timers, I/O watchers and other asynchronous event primitives.
Polyphony makes it possible to use normal Ruby built-in classes like IO, and Socket in a concurrent fashion without having to resort to threads. Polyphony takes care of context-switching automatically whenever a blocking call like Socket#accept or IO#read is issued.
Features
- Full-blown, integrated, high-performance HTTP 1 / HTTP 2 / WebSocket server with TLS/SSL termination, automatic ALPN protocol selection, and body streaming.
- Co-operative scheduling of concurrent tasks using Ruby fibers.
- High-performance event reactor for handling I/O events and timers.
- Natural, sequential programming style that makes it easy to reason about concurrent code.
- Abstractions and constructs for controlling the execution of concurrent code: coprocesses, supervisors, cancel scopes, throttling, resource pools etc.
- Code can use native networking classes and libraries, growing support for
third-party gems such as
pgandredis. - Use stdlib classes such as
TCPServer,TCPSocketand - HTTP 1 / HTTP 2 client agent with persistent connections.
- Competitive performance and scalability characteristics, in terms of both throughput and memory consumption.
Prior Art
Polyphony draws inspiration from the following, in no particular order:
- nio4r and async (Polyphony's C-extension code is largely a spinoff of nio4r's)
- EventMachine
- Trio
- Erlang supervisors (and actually, Erlang in general)
Documentation
The complete documentation for Polyphony could be found on the Polyphony website.