In the last post I talked about some differences between fibers and continuations. What may not have been clear is that continuations are more primitive and flexible than fibers are. In fact, you can implement fibers using continuations.

Here’s how. The basic idea is that we want to maintain two variables with continuations in them, inside and outside. The first one will transfer execution into the block of code that forms the fiber. The second will transfer control back to the outside world.

When the outside world calls #resume, we save our continuation point as outside, and call the current inside continuation. When, within the block, #yield is called, we save our current continuation point as inside, and transfer code back to the current outside.

There are a few more details in terms of passing values from #yield to #resume, handling the return value of the block, and handling excessive calls to #resume, but that’s the basic story. Here’s the code:

require 'continuation'

class CFiber
  class Error < StandardError; end

  def initialize &block
    @block = block
    callcc do |cc|
      @inside = cc
      return
    end
    @var = @block.call self
    @inside = nil
    @outside.call
  end

  def resume
    raise Error, "dead cfiber called!" unless @inside
    callcc do |cc|
      @outside = cc
      @inside.call
    end
    @var
  end

  def yield var
    callcc do |cc|
      @var = var
      @inside = cc
      @outside.call
    end
  end
end

This is also runnable on Ruby 1.8—just remove the require.

So why does Ruby 1.9 bother to implement fibers, when we can just use continuations? I don’t know what the real answer is, but “speed” is at least a good answer. Let’s do some some benchmarking to compare the two:

require 'benchmark'
n = ARGV.shift.to_i
Benchmark.bm do |bm|
  bm.report " fibers" do
    f = Fiber.new do
      x, y = 0, 1
      loop do
        Fiber.yield y
        x, y = y, x + y
      end
    end

    n.times { |i| f.resume }
  end

  bm.report "cfibers" do
    f = CFiber.new do |c|
      x, y = 0, 1
      loop do
        c.yield y
        x, y = y, x + y
      end
    end

    n.times { |i| f.resume }
  end
end

We’ll start with backporting that code to the Ruby 1.8.7 that Ubuntu provides (ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72)). For 10000 Fibonacci numbers, we see:

That’s roughly 11.4kfps (that’s thousand Fibonacci numbers per second) that we can produce using continuation-based fibers.

Let’s try the ancient Ruby 1.9.0 that Ubuntu provides (Ruby 1.9.0 (2008-06-20 revision 17482)):

Wow, fibers are fast: 250kfps. But things have gotten significantly worse for cfibers, clocking at a measely 0.489kfps for cfibers.

Finally let’s try the latest and greatest Ruby 1.9.1 (ruby 1.9.1p129 (2009-05-12 revision 23412)):

Fibers are just as fast as before, but continuations have improved dramatically—from 11.4kfps to 66.6kfps. Still, native fibers are more than three times faster.

So perhaps Ruby 1.9.1 is the best of both worlds. When you need fast non-preemptive concurrency, you can use native fibers; when you need to implement your own crazy control structures, you can use continuations and be assured that they’re still pretty darn fast (at least, as far as Ruby operations are concerned).