README

Summary

Represents forks (child processes) as objects and makes interaction with forks easy.

Features

• Object oriented usage of forks
• Easy-to-use implementation of future (Fork.future { computation }.call # => result)
• Provides facilities for IO between parent and fork
• Supports sending ruby objects to the forked process
• Supports reading ruby objects from the forked process

Installation

gem install fork

Usage

An example using a future:

def fib(n) n < 2 ? n : fib(n-1)+fib(n-2); end # <-- bad implementation of fibonacci
future = Fork.future do
  fib(35)
end
# do something expensive in the parent process
puts future.call # this blocks, until the fork finished, and returns the last value

A more complex example, using some of Fork's features:

# Create a fork with two-directional IO, which returns values and raises
# exceptions in the parent process.
fork = Fork.new :to_fork, :from_fork do |fork|
  while received = fork.receive_object
    p :fork_received => received
  end
end
fork.execute # spawn child process and start executing
fork.send_object(123)
puts "Fork runs as process with pid #{fork.pid}"
fork.send_object(nil) # terminate the fork
fork.wait # wait until the fork is indeed terminated
puts "Fork is dead, as expected" if fork.dead?

Links

• Online API Documentation
• Public Repository
• Bug Reporting
• RubyGems Site

License

You can use this code under the {file:LICENSE.txt BSD-2-Clause License}, free of charge. If you need a different license, please ask the author.