Rubygem-nio4r

Jul 20, 2023

Cross-platform asynchronous I/O primitives

nio4r provides an abstract, cross-platform stateful I/O selector API for Ruby. I/O selectors are the heart of “reactor”-based event loops, and monitor multiple I/O objects for various types of readiness, e.g. ready for reading or writing.

The most similar API provided by Ruby today is Kernel.select, however the select API requires you to pass in arrays of all of the I/O objects you’re interested in every time. nio4r provides a more object-oriented API that lets you register I/O objects with a selector then handle them when they’re selected for various types of events.

nio4r is modeled after the Java NIO API, but simplified for ease-of-use.

Its goals are

  • Expose high-level interfaces for stateful IO selectors
  • Keep the API small to maximize both portability and performance across many different OSes and Ruby VMs
  • Provide inherently thread-safe facilities for working with IO objects


Checkout these related ports:
  • Zziplib - Library to provide transparent read access to zipped files
  • Zydis - Fast and lightweight x86/x86-64 disassembler library
  • Zycore-c - Support library with platform independent types, macros, etc for Zydis
  • Zthread - Platform-independent object-oriented C++ threading library
  • Zookeeper - Coordination Service for Distributed Applications
  • Zls - Zig LSP implementation + Zig Language Server
  • Zfp - High throughput library for compressed floating-point arrays
  • Zeal - Offline documentation browser
  • Zapcc - C++ caching compiler based on clang
  • Zanata-platform - Web-based translation platform
  • Zanata-cli - Zanata Java command line client
  • Z88dk - Complete Z80/Z180 development kit
  • Z80ex - ZiLOG Z80 CPU emulator library
  • Z80asm - Assembler for the Z80 microprocessor
  • Z80-asm - Z80 assembly code assembler and disassembler