Chapter 13. Threads in Ruby
He draweth out the thread of his argument finer than the staple of his verbosity
—William Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost, Act V, Sc. 1
Threads are sometimes called lightweight processes. They are nothing more than a way to achieve concurrency without all the overhead of switching tasks at the operating system level. (Of course, the computing community is not in perfect agreement about the definition of threads, but we won’t go into that.)
Ruby threads are user-level threads and are operating system independent. They work on DOS as well as on UNIX. There will definitely be a performance hit, however, which also varies by operating system.
Threads are useful in circumstances where, for instance, separate pieces of ...
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