[MacRuby-devel] Fibers and Enumerators

[macruby at djc.net]

I agree (I don't see a performance issue, rather, a compatibility issue)

While I am certain everyone would agree that 100% compatibility should be the 
goal, I am not convinced how "critical" this addition is:
in particular, how difficult is it to do a quick code change?
Unlike basic data types, there are quite a few reasons I don't see Fibers 
being a large percentage of any code.

Does anyone have any truly compelling examples where Fibers are truly the 
only/right way to go, vs. an alternate design?

I don't see them scaling well (see ruby-doc.org) - meaning, their advantage is 
restricted in scope.

e.g. (MSDN)
"In general, fibers do not provide advantages over a well-designed 
multithreaded application."

The term "lightweight" seems to correlate near 1.0 with "fiber" on web 
pages... one (not all) of GCD's primary goals in life is: lightweight ... 
which makes me think/agree this really boils down to measuring the pain/cost 
of having this one feature MIA (e.g. source translation/compatibility) vs. 
not...

-Daniel


On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:15:54 -0700
  "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> On Aug 11, 2010, at 3:23 PM, easco wrote:
> 
>> My concern for the feature is focused not so much on the performance impact 
>>of using it, as it focuses on the fact that Fibers have been added to the 
>>1.9.x language. They appear to be an important part of the External 
>>Enumerators feature and that feature seems to have a lot of people very 
>>excited.
>> 
>> Any external libraries that make use of Fibers or External Enumerators stand 
>>a good chance of not working in MacRuby. In that case MacRuby becomes 
>>"Mac-MostOfRuby" which makes it harder to adopt... etc.  I'd rather that 
>>didn't happen.
> 
> Perhaps the big take-away from this discussion then is that we need someone 
>to pick up the gauntlet of Fiber support in MacRuby and figure out how to 
>make it perform "acceptably" given the caveats Laurent has already outlined. 
> Any volunteers?
> 
> - Jordan
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MacRuby-devel mailing list
> MacRuby-devel at lists.macosforge.org
> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel