Ruby - Immutable Objects
- by Chris Bunch
I've got a highly multithreaded app written in Ruby that shares a few instance variables. Writes to these variables are rare (1%) while reads are very common (99%). What is the best way (either in your opinion or in the idiomatic Ruby fashion) to ensure that these threads always see the most up-to-date values involved? Here's some ideas so far that I had (although I'd like your input before I overhaul this):
Have a lock that most be used before reading or writing any of these variables (from Java Concurrency in Practice). The downside of this is that it puts a lot of synchronize blocks in my code and I don't see an easy way to avoid it.
Use Ruby's freeze method (see here), although it looks equally cumbersome and doesn't give me any of the synchronization benefits that the first option gives.
These options both seem pretty similar but hopefully anyone out there will have a better idea (or can argue well for one of these ideas). I'd also be fine with making the objects immutable so they aren't corrupted or altered in the middle of an operation, but I don't know Ruby well enough to make the call on my own and this question seems to argue that objects are highly mutable.
