>> Seriously, though, I'm not sure a whole book on metaprogramming,
>> Ruby-based or otherwise, is either necessary or useful at this point in
>> the technology cycle. There are quite a few articles on the subject.
>> What I'd rather see a book on is dealing with *concurrency* in Ruby.
>> Dual-core and quad-core chips aren't going away. :) Francis? You're our
>> resident expert, I think ...
>
> But concurrency in Ruby is still green threads, so that would have to be 
> either concurrency with YARV, or concurrency with separate Ruby 
> processes communicating in some way.

I've done concurrent Ruby processes, with System V IPC shared memory (to
shove video around and do the control from Ruby). It did the job on a
hyperthreading dual Xeon (4 virtual CPUs on linux, a dozen Ruby processes or
so). The code is owned by my employer, tho.

A wrapper around sys V has been done by others, too; mix in a bit of dRb and
I think you're rolling (except when you want Erlang-level of performance).

Anyone have experience with grid?

Bye,
Kero.

PS: You could easily do these performance chapters:
 - system V
 - grid
 - Yarv
 - embedded systems
 - fast libraries (narray comes to mind)
 - hints for optimizing ruby-code (?)
and I'm sure there's more.

Bye,
Kero.