Ruactor

A simple actors implementation in Ruby.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ruactor'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install ruactor

Usage

class Foo
  include Ruactor::Actor

  def foo(arg)
    "#{:foo} #{arg}"
  end
end

x = Foo.new
x.send! :foo, :bar  #asynchronous execution - will occur in another thread at some point in the future

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/ruactor. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Ruactor project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.

Alternatives

Conceptually similar to Celluloid. Obviously Celluloid is a much larger project with much more development effort put into it. It's main drawback is it's thread-per-actor model, which doesn't perform well on MRI with it's green threads and GIL. For that reason, I prefer Ruactor's model of adding asynchronous calls to a queue which is dispatched by a small threadpool instead.