Demystifying Ruby: It's all about threads (2024)

Ruby is a dynamic, interpreted, open-source programming language known for its simplicity, productivity, and its “human-readable” syntax. Ruby is often used in web development, particularly with the Ruby on Rails framework. It supports object-oriented, functional, and imperative programming paradigms. The most known and used Ruby Virtual Machine is the Matz Ruby Interpreter (aka CRuby), developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), the creator of Ruby. All other Ruby implementation such as JRuby, TruffleRuby and so on are out of the scope of this blog post. The MRI implements the Global Interpreter Lock, a mechanism to ensure that one and only one thread runs at the same time effectively limiting true parallelism. Reading between the lines, one can understand that Ruby is multi-threaded, but with a parallelism limit of 1 (or maybe more 👀). Many popular Gems such as Puma, Sidekiq, Rails, Sentry are multi-threaded Process 💎, Ractor 🦖, Threads 🧵 and Fibers 🌽 Here’s an overview of all t ... Read full article.