Morans! I am surrounded by Morans!

I posted a response on a blog recently. The fellow claimed, quite explicitly, that "Fibers and EventMachine were a response to Ruby's poor Threading performance". I responded with Fibers and EventMachine were not made in "response" to Ruby's Thread implementation. I am strangely polite in online discussions, where in person I'd have ripped this guy a new asshole.

I explained that Threads exist because n = read(fd, buf, len) blocks. Threads allow execute work to continue in parallel to blocked IO. That he had it backwards, event driven IO, like EventMachine, exist so a user-space program can continue to execute work while the IO finishes in the Kernel. While user-space programmers don't explicitly invoke the switching of one thread to another, context switching is not costless. In fact the cost of context switching is many hundreds of CPU instructions.

Relatedly, Fibers are cheap where Threads are expensive. Fibers switch into a parallel call stack, much like Threads, with the equivalent of a register switch and a long jump. Additionally, the ability to return results from a Fiber while preserving the Fiber's call stack state allow for remarkable new behaviors to be constructed that can not be done with out them.

It seems these Ruby coders one of two types: One, HTML monkeys that have learned how to code, or Two Java refugees that got tired of Bondage-and-Discipline style of programming. Both of these kind of MORANS, don't understand that Ruby is a remarkable Programming language with features not available in other languages. Neither Perl nor Java, have the concept that every variable is an object. Nor do either language have Fibers/coroutines. These features change the very nature of the code you write.

P.S.
I plan to post some code to show synchronous read/write IO calls while doing all the actual IO inside EventMachine. So you get the best of both worlds ala synchronous IO with out blocking. Stay tuned; same Bat Time same Bat Channel...