ifuture

Deprecation Notice

THIS GEM IS DEPRECATED!

ifuture was implemented with the no-longer-supported ichannel gem for interprocess communication over either a Unix Socket or Redis. Futures can be implemented more elegantly and with less overhead by intraprocess communication with a GVL-less Ruby like JRuby, Rubinius or Ruby 3+.

ifuture uses processes forking rather than threads. This allows parallelism with early versions of MRI without the GVL blocking as it might with threads. Run your code in another process and get the result back later!

The Future starts running right away, but isn't blocking because it runs in its own forked process and uses ichannel to communicate with the parent process. If the value is asked for and it is ready, it will be returned right away. If the value is asked for early, the Future blocks until delivery.

Installation

gem install ifuture

The Redis gem is required as well if you opt to use Redis instead of the default Unix socket transporter.

gem install redis

Usage

require 'ifuture'
future = IFuture.unix Marshal do
  sleep 2
  'result back from the child process!'
end

future.ready? #=> false
sleep 2
future.ready? #=> true
future.value #=> "result back from the child process!"

Code Serialization Format

The default serialization format is Marshal, but you can use JSON, YAML or other formats that implement the methods #load and #dump.

require 'ifuture'
require 'json'
future = IFuture.unix JSON do
  sleep 2
  {ok: true}
end
future.value #=> {"ok"=>true}

IPC Transporter

By default ifuture uses ichannel with unix sockets for transferring serialized code. An alternate choice is to use ichannel with Redis, locally or over the network.

require 'ifuture'
future = IFuture.redis Marshal, {host: 'localhost', key: 'readme'} do
  sleep 5
  42
end
future.value #=> 42