Feature #22128
Updated by byroot (Jean Boussier) 4 months ago
### Context
I'm trying to experiment with adapting Active Record for a Ractor architecture.
Since database connections can't possibly be Ractor shareable, the idea is to warp each connection inside its own ractor, and then send SQL queries and responses through a port.
But for this to perform well, I'd like to directly build the query response as a fully shareable object, so that it can be pushed into the port for free, instead of having Ruby need to recursively walk the potentially large response to mark objects as shareable.
Here's an example of how it would work in trilogy: https://github.com/byroot/trilogy/commit/5f58200b398995d2fc0d4673a5a6bbccd0dd235d
### Problem
Unfortunately, the necessary API isn't currently exposed in the C API:
- `RB_OBJ_SET_FROZEN_SHAREABLE`
- `RB_OBJ_SET_SHAREABLE` / `rb_obj_set_shareable`
I understand that this API could potentially be misused, but given it's a C API, I believe it's acceptable to require care from the caller.
### Benchmark
```ruby
# frozen_string_literal: true
require 'trilogy'
require 'benchmark/ips'
baseline = Trilogy.new(database: "test")
shareable = Trilogy.new(database: "test", shareable: true)
values = {
null_test: "test",
bit_test: "test",
single_bit_test: 1,
tiny_int_test: 2,
bool_cast_test: true,
small_int_test: 4,
medium_int_test: 23434,
int_test: 324234,
big_int_test: 234234,
unsigned_big_int_test: 23423423,
float_test: 234234,
float_zero_test: 213.23,
double_test: 23123.12323,
decimal_test: 123213.12312,
decimal_zero_test: 213213.21323,
date_test: "2026-01-30",
date_time_test: "2026-01-30 14:03:56",
date_time_with_precision_test: "2026-01-30 14:03:56.12",
time_with_precision_test: "2026-01-30 14:03:56.12",
timestamp_test: "2026-01-30 14:03:56.12",
varchar_test: "VARCHAR"
}
baseline.query("DELETE FROM trilogy_test")
insert = "INSERT INTO trilogy_test(#{values.keys.join(", ")}) VALUES (#{values.values.map(&:inspect).join(", ")})"
1000.times do
baseline.query(insert)
end
p shareable.query("SELECT * FROM test.trilogy_test").to_a.size
Benchmark.ips do |x|
x.report("baseline") { Ractor.make_shareable(baseline.query("SELECT * FROM trilogy_test")) }
x.report("shareable") { Ractor.make_shareable(shareable.query("SELECT * FROM trilogy_test")) }
x.compare!(order: :baseline)
end
```
```
ruby 4.1.0dev (2026-06-24T13:17:28Z expose-ractor-set-.. f9d7dd50cd) +PRISM [arm64-darwin25]
Warming up --------------------------------------
baseline 42.000 39.000 i/100ms
shareable 66.000 i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
baseline 220.024 (±43.2%) 228.083 (±39.9%) i/s (4.54 (4.38 ms/i) - 1.134k 1.170k in 5.153976s 5.129719s
shareable 677.487 685.128 (± 2.4%) 1.3%) i/s (1.48 (1.46 ms/i) - 3.432k in 5.065782s
Comparison:
baseline: 220.0 i/s
shareable: 677.5 i/s - 3.08x faster 5.009286s
```