LightIO provides green thread to ruby. Like Golang's goroutine, or Crystal's fiber. In LightIO it is called beam.

Example:

require 'lightio'

start = Time.now

beams = 1000.times.map do
  # LightIO::Beam is green-thread, use it instead Thread
  LightIO::Beam.new do
    # do some io operations in beam
    LightIO.sleep(1)
  end
end

beams.each(&:join)
seconds = Time.now - start
puts "1000 beams take #{seconds - 1} seconds to create"

LightIO ship ruby stdlib compatible library under LightIO or LightIO::Library namespace, these libraries provide the ability to schedule LightIO beams when IO operations occur.

LightIO also provide a monkey patch, it replaces ruby Thread with LightIO::Thread, and also replaces IO related classes.

Example:

require 'lightio'
# apply monkey patch at beginning
LightIO::Monkey.patch_all!

require 'net/http'

host = 'github.com'
port = 443

start = Time.now

10.times.map do
  Thread.new do
    Net::HTTP.start(host, port, use_ssl: true) do |http|
      res = http.request_get('/ping')
      p res.code
    end
  end
end.each(&:join)

puts "#{Time.now - start} seconds"

See Examples for detail.

In fact ruby core team already plan to implement Thread::Green in core language, see https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/13618

It means if ruby implemented Thread::Green, this library has no reason to exist. But as a crazy userland implemented green thread library, it bring lots of fun to me, so I will continue to maintain it, and welcome to use.

See Wiki and Roadmap to get more information.

LightIO is build upon nio4r. Get heavily inspired by gevent, async-io.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'lightio'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install lightio

Please see LightIO Wiki for more information.

The following documentations is also usable:

• Basic usage
• YARD documentation
• Examples

https://groups.google.com/group/lightio

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/jjyr/lightio. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Copyright, 2017-2018, by Jiang Jinyang

Everyone interacting in the Lightio project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.