Multicore programming with ruby

As I understand it multicore programming is about the ability to utilize multiple CPUs.
Also I hear a lot of people saying ruby cannot use multiple CPUs.

This is a load of rubbish if you are on a *nix system.

All you have to do if you want to use multiple CPUs is fork{} and it is running in its own process.
You can leave whatever is in the block to run and reap the process later, or detatch it if you do not need to see the results.

Fork returns the PID of the process it spawns, and used with Process.waitpid(), you can make the main process wait for the results to come back from the child. If you want the results yourself, you can just open a pipe between the child and the main process with IO.pipe

Simple.

read, write = IO.pipe
pid = fork do
  write.puts "test"
end
Process.waitpid(pid)
write.close
puts read.read
read.close


Resources:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/IO.html
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Process.html
Example based on:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1076257/returning-data-from-forked-processes