grogenaut a day ago

I've generally found token bucket retries a lot better than circuit breakers which by nature are very bi-modal, sending no requests then floods of requests in higher scale systems. This can cause issues with memory and garbage collection when it's flapping on the order of milliseconds to seconds, and cause isues with load balancers and autoscaling when operating on the order of minutes. Token Buckets tend to dial the pressue up and down more smoothly. It's like the difference between an old fashioned thermostat and a PID loop for controlling a temperature setpoint.

  • seuros a day ago

    Circuit breakers are inherently bi-modal (all-or-nothing) while token buckets provide smooth pressure control like cruise control vs an on/off switch.

    BreakerMachines focuses specifically on failure protection rather than rate limiting. Circuit breakers and token buckets solve different problems:

    - Circuit breakers: Reactive failure protection (stop calling broken services)

    - Token buckets: Proactive rate control (smooth request throttling)

    They're complementary patterns. I actually have a rate limiter gem with token buckets, sliding windows, and distributed rate limiting, but I will open source it when my ship lands on a planet or a moon. Still navigating hyperspace.

    Thanks for the feedback

seuros 5 days ago

Hey HN! I extracted BreakerMachines from my apps after seeing people dealing with cascading failures in production Rails apps.

Key features that set it apart:

- True async/fiber support (works with Falcon, async gems)

- Built-in fallback mechanism with chaining

- Thread-safe without dangerous Timeout.timeout

- Memory-efficient with WeakRef tracking

- Rich introspection and monitoring hooks

- Clean DSL that works with inheritance

With everyone adding AI/LLM APIs to their apps, circuit breakers are more critical than ever.

These APIs can be slow, flaky, or have outages - without protection, your app goes down with them.

The README shows patterns for graceful degradation when a service is down.

I explicitly avoided shipping Redis/DB adapters to keep it focused, the README shows how to implement your own in ~20 lines.

Would love feedback on the API design and any edge cases I might have missed!

I'm still going to add the parallel feature, i removed it because i need to test it in CI.

  • byroot a day ago

    > Would love feedback on the API design

    I'd suggest to drop the DSL, at the end of the day, a good old class with a constructor stored in a constant is much more more transparent:

        class PaymentService
      STRIPE_CIRCUIT = BreakerMachines::Circuit.new(
        threshold: { failures: 3, within: 1.minute },
        reset_after: 30.seconds,
        fallback: ->{ { error: "Payment queued for later" } }
      )

      def charge(amount)
        STRIPE_CIRCUIT.wrap do
          Stripe::Charge.create(amount: amount)
        end
      end
    end
    Just my 2 cents though.
    • seuros a day ago

      Merci pour la remarque !

      Your 2 space credits are worth their weight in dilithium.

      Funny thing is the gem originally started exactly like that, pure explicit constructors. Then I wrapped it with the DSL sugar but the explicit approach never lost its capability. Both paths lead to the same destination.

      I actually loved this suggestion so much that I added a whole section called "Captain Byroot's Guide to Explicit Circuit Construction" to the docs:

      https://github.com/seuros/breaker_machines/blob/master/docs/....

      The resistance appreciates your feedback.

rexpop 14 hours ago

> Welcome to April 2005—when Git was born, branches were just master, and nobody cared about your pronouns.

JFC, whatever happened to "Matz is nice, so we are nice"?

felipemesquita 5 days ago

I’m usually weary of long readmes with too much styling as that indicates to me a high likelihood that they were written by ai and the author might not have even read all of it. The use of generic ai images also gives a bad impression - for example, there’s an image captioned “The green lines? Those are your CPU cycles escaping.” without anything green pictured.

I’m not saying your gem is bad. It’s nice to se an attempt at a circuit breaker that is based on the state machines gem, I will certainly look into the actual code if I have a need for it in the future.

Just wanted to give you this bit of feedback about maybe cutting down on length and loosing the ai images in the readme as I think it might be a turnoff for others as well.

  • seuros 5 days ago

    Appreciate the feedback—really.

    You are correct to point out the mismatch on the image caption, i generated a few and copied the wrong one. That one's on me, i will update it later.

    And while AI might correct a typo or help rephrase a sentence here or there (I’m not a native English speaker), everything in that README—tone, structure, content, rants, and lore—is 100% me. It's my style. Love it or leave it.

    As for scaring people off ? That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. This is an open source circuit breaker, not a SaaS onboarding funnel. If someone decides not to use a well-tested library because the README isn’t sterile enough for their corporate taste, that is their loss. I'm not here trying to win two potential enterprise clients who expect a PDF pitch deck and a hug.

    The circuit breaker pattern itself isn’t new, I didn't invent it, it has even its own wikipedia page. But the Ruby ecosystem? Still treating it like a nice to have.

    Existing circuit breaker gems like Circuitbox, Semian, etc., are stuck in the past. They rely on patterns and syntax from the Ruby 2.6 era, and integrating them into a modern codebase often means a painful refactor or bending your architecture backwards. BreakerMachines is built for 2025, fully async, fiber-safe, and designed to work with modern Ruby without dragging a legacy ball and chain. It's don't even support version of ruby that is 1 version behind. Upgrade then use.

    If someone is going to get frustrated by a long README or AI-generated images, they’re welcome to go pay someone to write them a handcrafted if/else block and call it resilience.

    The code is clean. The tests are good. And if just that MD file makes them walk away from that—again, their loss. They don't even read it.

    I maintain a ton of gems. And I’ll be honest: my enthusiasm for open source has been repeatedly drained by the "please make this more corporate-friendly" crowd. Not talking about you specifically—but there’s a whole wave of people who want everything politically polished and personality-free. That’s not why Ruby was created.

    Ruby was made for joy. And this gem? It reflects that.

    Cheers for actually reading and for giving honest feedback. You’re rare for that. Just don’t expect me to dress up like a SaaS salesperson anytime soon.

    • moritonal a day ago

      I actually like the style. It's very on brand for Ruby from what I've read. Make coding punk again.

    • Perz1val 21 hours ago

      I mean no offense, but your writing style gives the LLM vibe, this comment included. They all start with saying the user is right and thanking for their input, then wall of text, then a hook to incentivise further discussion. All well formatted and split into logical paragraphs. It is good and correct, but you may wish to not sound like chatbot

      • seuros 21 hours ago

        No offense taken—you're absolutely right.

        In fact, I even added an em dash shortcut to my Logitech POP keyboard. That’s dedication. See? — — — — —

        I’m not just writing like this—I’ve industrialized it.

        If it sounds like a chatbot, maybe it's because I have spent too much time training them and not enough time pretending to be a chaos monkey in HN threads.

        Appreciate the feedback though.

        Now excuse me while I reboot into Windows just to add and to my custom shortcuts.

        I have still got one more slot—what do you think I should add?

        Go wild. Bonus points if it makes someone uninstall the gem out of pure emotional confusion.

        • chao- 20 hours ago

          As someone else who appreciates em dashes—deploying them judiciously for many years, I too am plagued by people suddenly perceiving my natural writing style as suspect.

          • seuros 20 hours ago

            Same here, i used them for years.

            Feel you.

        • ljm 20 hours ago

          I'm not sure if I'm on HN or LinkedIn Lunatics now.

  • ljm 20 hours ago

    I'm sure I saw this gem posted a few days ago (maybe not on HN?) and at the time all the docs were in one mahoosive README.

    I think it's a massive improvement that it's been broken down into chapters in a docs folder. I can take or leave the writing style but do miss the old whimsy of _why and his poignant guide to ruby. The examples are great and quite thorough.

  • dewey a day ago

    Reading this I expected the README to be unreadable, filled with images and emojis, but found them to be very detailed with lots of code examples (Which I often miss in Gems) and explanations which was obviously a lot of work to do. Thanks for that!

    PS: Speaking of "bit of feedback" for the parent commenter, it's losing not loosing.

  • seuros 4 days ago

    I did split the readme now. Thank you again.