ThreadService maintains lists ofall the JRuby-specific thread data structures
needed for Ruby's threading API and for JRuby's execution. The main
structures are:
- ThreadContext, which contains frames, scopes, etc needed for Ruby execution
- RubyThread, the Ruby object representation of a thread's state
- RubyThreadGroup, which represents a group of Ruby threads
- NativeThread, used to wrap native Java threads
- FutureThread, used to wrap java.util.concurrent.Future
In order to ensure these structures do not linger after the thread has terminated,
most of them are either weakly or softly referenced. The references associated
with these structures are:
- ThreadService has a hard reference to a ThreadLocal, which holds a soft reference
to a ThreadContext. So the thread's locals softly reference ThreadContext.
We use a soft reference to keep ThreadContext instances from going away too
quickly when a Java thread leaves Ruby space completely, which would otherwise
result in a lot of ThreadContext object churn.
- ThreadService maintains a weak map from the actual java.lang.Thread (or
java.util.concurrent.Future) instance to the associated RubyThread. The map
is weak-keyyed, so it will not prevent the collection of the associated
Thread or Future. The associated RubyThread will remain alive as long as the
Thread/Future and this ThreadService instance are both alive, maintaining
the external thread's identity in Ruby-land.
- RubyThread has a weak reference to its to ThreadContext.
- ThreadContext has a hard reference to its associated RubyThread. Ignoring other
references, this will usually mean RubyThread is softly reachable via the
soft threadlocal reference to ThreadContext in ThreadService.
- RubyThreadGroup has hard references to threads it owns. The thread removes
itself on termination (if it's a Ruby thread) or when the ThreadContext is
collected (as in the case of "adopted" Java threads.
These data structures can come to life in one of two ways:
- A Ruby thread is started. This constructs a new RubyThread object, which
calls to ThreadService to initialize a ThreadContext and appropriate mappings
in all ThreadService's structures. The body of the thread is wrapped with a
finally block that will forcibly unregister the thread and all related
structures from ThreadService.
- A Java thread enters Ruby by doing a call. The thread is "adopted", and
gains a RubyThread instance, a ThreadContext instance, and all associated
mappings in ThreadService. Since we don't know when the thread has "left"
Ruby permanently, no forcible unregistration is attempted for the various
structures and maps. However, they should not be hard-rooted; the
ThreadContext is only softly reachable at best if no calls are in-flight,
so it will collect. Its collection will release the reference to RubyThread,
and its finalizer will unregister that RubyThread from its RubyThreadGroup.
With the RubyThread gone, the Thread-to-RubyThread map will eventually clear,
releasing the hard reference to the Thread itself.