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
pg
andredis
. -
Use stdlib classes such as
TCPServer
,TCPSocket
and -
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)
-
Erlang supervisors (and actually, Erlang in general)
Documentation¶ ↑
The complete documentation for Polyphony
could be found on the Polyphony website.