File: README — Documentation for nio4r (2.1.0)

NOTE: This is the 2.x stable branch of nio4r. For the 1.x legacy branch, please see:

https://github.com/socketry/nio4r/tree/1-x-stable

New I/O for Ruby (nio4r): cross-platform asynchronous I/O primitives for scalable network clients and servers. Modeled after the Java NIO API, but simplified for ease-of-use.

nio4r provides an abstract, cross-platform stateful I/O selector API for Ruby. I/O selectors are the heart of "reactor"-based event loops, and monitor multiple I/O objects for various types of readiness, e.g. ready for reading or writing.

Projects using nio4r

ActionCable: Rails 5 WebSocket protocol, uses nio4r for a WebSocket server
Celluloid::IO: Actor-based concurrency framework, uses nio4r for async I/O
Socketry Async: Asynchronous I/O framework for Ruby

Goals

Expose high-level interfaces for stateful IO selectors
Keep the API small to maximize both portability and performance across many different OSes and Ruby VMs
Provide inherently thread-safe facilities for working with IO objects

Supported platforms

Ruby 2.2.2+
Ruby 2.3
Ruby 2.4
JRuby 9000

Supported backends

libev: MRI C extension targeting multiple native IO selector APIs (e.g epoll, kqueue)
Java NIO: JRuby extension which wraps the Java NIO subsystem
Pure Ruby: Kernel.select-based backend that should work on any Ruby interpreter

Discussion

For discussion and general help with nio4r, email [email protected] or join on the web via the Google Group.

We're also on IRC at ##socketry on irc.freenode.net.

Documentation

Please see the nio4r wiki for more detailed documentation and usage notes:

Getting Started: Introduction to nio4r's components
Selectors: monitor multiple IO objects for readiness events
Monitors: control interests and inspect readiness for specific IO objects
Byte Buffers: fixed-size native buffers for high-performance I/O

Non-goals

nio4r is not a full-featured event framework like EventMachine or Cool.io. Instead, nio4r is the sort of thing you might write a library like that on top of. nio4r provides a minimal API such that individual Ruby implementers may choose to produce optimized versions for their platform, without having to maintain a large codebase.