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Dramatis: Actors for Ruby
Steven ParkesOther formats
Multicores. Distributed web services. Clouds. Pick your favorite buzz word, but pretty much any way you slice it, it's concurrent programming: multiple things happening all over the place, all at the same time. Until recently, this pretty much meant threads and sockets. But then the Prags published Programming Erlang and a lot of people heard about an alternative model (not that Erlang or the actor model are new, but ...) And many of us writing in Ruby got a severe case of actor envy (or Erlang envy?) In this talk, we'll introduce actors and Dramatis, an open source library that brings actors to Ruby. We'll start with a discussion of actors, and how they compare to threads. Then we'll introduce and show examples of writing actor programs in Dramatis, which implements the actor model into Ruby in a unique and (hopefully) natural way. We'll compare Dramatis to other actor libraries and implementations and highlight issues around writing actor-based concurrent programs in an object-oriented, imperative, dynamic language.
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