Ruby goes to Hollywood

Computers are being built with more and more CPUs and those CPUs in turn have several cores. Powerful calculations are now performed either on many-cored machines, or on distributed systems.

In this context, it’s in the developer’s interest to start thinking about concurrent programming. But concurrent programming with mutable is tricky. The last few years have conclusively shown that very few developers get this right when faced with conventional shared state threads.

One of the ways to simplify concurrent programming is the actor model. In the actor model, programs are made of actors sending each other messages, and acting on the messages they receive. The actors don’t share any state.

This talk will explore several ways to implement the actor model in Ruby.

The talk will also allude to the fact that threads in Ruby should ideally have separate state, so that all programs using threads could also use the actor model (or other similar concurrency models).