Ractors in Ruby 3.1

Embracing Concurrency: A Guide to Using Ractors in Ruby 3.1

good girl

Ruby 3.1 introduces a revolutionary feature for handling concurrency: Ractors. This article aims to demystify Ractors and illustrate how they can be leveraged to optimize performance in Ruby applications.

What are Ractors?

Ractors, short for Ruby Actors, are Ruby’s answer to the concurrency challenge. They are lightweight, isolated units of execution designed to run in parallel without interfering with each other. This isolation ensures thread-safe operations, making them ideal for CPU-bound tasks.

Key Features:

• Isolation: Each Ractor has its own separate heap, preventing data races.
• Communication: Ractors communicate via message passing, ensuring thread safety.
• Parallel Execution: They can run in parallel on multiple CPUs.

Setting Up a Ractor

To create a Ractor in Ruby 3.1, use the Ractor.new method:

This block of code will run independently of the main thread.