The Digital Press

Ruby's Ractors, designed for parallel execution, suffer from severe performance issues due to locking on class instance variables, but a new lock-free approach shows promise.

Why it matters: Removing locks on class instance variables enables much faster parallel execution with Ractors, improving Ruby's concurrency model.

The big picture: The solution involves delegating instance variables to a separate object, allowing atomic swaps and avoiding VM locks.

Stunning stat: After the patch, Ractor-based code runs nearly 3 times faster than single-threaded, and over 13 times faster than Ruby 3.4.

Commenters say: Readers appreciate the deep dive into Ruby internals, noting the clever lock-free design and its potential to unlock practical parallelism.