threadlocal

Ruby's thread local variables are badly designed compared to other languages, even Java or Python.

This gem fixes that.

Why?

In Ruby there's a global namespace of thread local names that are accessed like that:

Thread.current.thread_variable_get(:some_global_name)

This has two implications:

1. If e.g. Rails uses the :time_zone thread variable you can't. Obviously.
2. If an object uses a thread variable it has to make sure it cleans up after itself when it gets garbage collected.

In Java or Python instead of a global namespace where you assign keys to values you just create a new instance of a ThreadLocal (or threading.local) object, like this:

class MyThingy
  def initialize
    @some_setting = ThreadLocal.new(false)
  end

  def do_something
    if @some_setting.get == true
      # Do something only if it's enabled
    end
  end

  def enable_setting
    @some_setting.set(true)
  end
end

a = MyThingy.new
b = MyThingy.new

a and b have different ivars which means their thread-local setting will never clash. And when one of them gets garbage collected the thread local variable is cleaned up across all threads (not that important for a boolean but really important in the general case.) Success!

Obviously this works just as well

class MyThingy
  @settings = ThreadLocal.new({})

  def self.settings
    @settings.get
  end
end

MyThingy.settings[:whatever] # this is per thread now

The threadlocal gem works and is tested on Ruby 2.0 and 2.1, JRuby can use Java's built-in ThreadLocal (making this transparent is on the roadmap.)

ThreadLocalDelegator

There's also ThreadLocalDelegator which is mostly useful when supplied with a default value / default proc.

class MyThingy
  @settings = ThreadLocalDelegator.new({}) # will do {}.dup for every new thread since that's the default value

  def self.enable_something
    @settings[:something] = true
  end
end

Acknowledgements

Thanks to

• Konstantin Haase for finally getting me to write this. Also see this gist.