Show HN: I made a very simple ruby gem to make objects and variables persistent

https://github.com/philsippl/Durable

by philzip • 10 years ago

6 5 10 years ago

github.com

dbof• 10 years ago

Seems interesting, what would be a practical use for this? Replacing configuration files?

wingerlang• 10 years ago

Not the creator, but I can immediately see the use in, at least small projects.

Recently I made a little script that runs every now and then and I had to store the data manually (echo $val > file.txt) which is not that bad. But not having to do that little file-juggle might be the use case.

gonyea2• 10 years ago

Neat. I wouldn't use it, as I have a database :).

Some notes:

- it's not thread safe

- it's not jruby-safe

- you should generally avoid Marshal. It can have compatibility issues across Ruby versions, etc. plus yaml or json can be introspected by someone who needs to debug things.

- it looks like it saves state in your current working directory? That'll definitely burn you down the line.

- no tests. Im sure there's weird bugs hidden in there.

Edit - another observation:

- you're setting instance variables inside the class definition. Making them Class-Instance variables, rather than Instance-of-a-Class variables like you want.

You need to set them in the initialize method instead.

rco8786• 10 years ago

Is thread safety a concern with Ruby? Or are you thinking of multiple ruby processes using the same Durable?

gonyea2• 10 years ago

Yes. I actually mean both. Thread safety does and doesn't matter. MRI has a GIL so appending to an array across threads will "just work." JRuby doesn't and it won't end well if you're not giving it thought.

But yeah, multi-process web servers absolutely trample over each other. File access would need to be coordinated / synchronized.

Show HN: I made a very simple ruby gem to make objects and variables persistent

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