Celluloid 0.13.0: concurrent objects for Ruby

Celluloid 0.13 is out!

This was supposed to be the last release before 1.0, but as the release
cycle dragged on I felt I needed to get this version out there sooner as
it
includes neat new features:

  • Inter-actor stack traces: previously Celluloid’s stack traces were
    hard
    to interpret because they stopped at the boundaries between actors. Now
    Celluloid can trace calls across actors, assembling calls into a single
    stack trace that shows where calls between actors were made.
  • Celluloid::Condition: ConditionVariable-like signaling between tasks
    within the same actor or between actors

Another important change answers an often raised complaint: Celluloid
starts some default services and installs an exit handler which does a
clean shutdown and prints a small report. While I feel these features
are
important for people writing large programs with Celluloid, people just
getting started found this annoying.

Starting in Celluloid 0.13, you will now need to do:

require 'celluloid/autostart'

In order to launch the default services and install the exit handler. If
you only do:

require 'celluloid'

…no default services will be launched and no exit handler will be
installed.

Full changelog follows:

  • API change: Require Celluloid with: require ‘celluloid/autostart’ to
    automatically start support actors and configure at_exit handler which
    automatically terminates all actors.
  • API change: use_mailbox has been removed
  • API change: finalizers must be declared with “finalize :my_finalizer”
  • Bugfix: receivers don’t crash when methods are called incorrectly
  • Celluloid::Condition provides ConditionVariable-like signaling
  • Shutdown timeout reduced to 10 seconds
  • Stack traces across inter-actor calls! Should make Celluloid
    backtraces
    much easier to understand
  • Celluloid#call_chain_id provides UUIDs for calls across actors
  • Give all thread locals a :celluloid_* prefix