Unlocking Ractors: Object_id

In a previous post about ractors, I explained why I think it’s really unlikely you’d ever be able to run an entire application inside a ractor, but that they could still be situationally very useful to move CPU-bound work out of the main thread, and to unlock some parallel algorithm. But as I mentioned, this is unfortunately not yet viable because there are many known implementation bugs that can lead to interpreter crashes, and that while they are supposed to execute in parallel, the Ruby VM still has one true global lock that Ractors need to acquire to perform certain operations, making them often perform worse than the equivalent single-threaded code. But things are evolving rapidly. Since then, there is now a team of people working on fixing exactly that: tackling known bugs and eliminating or reducing the remaining contention points. The one example I gave to illustrate this remaining contention, was the fstring_table , which in short is a big internal hash table used to dedupl ... Read full article.