I've complained for a long time that ruby's stdlib is pretty bad.
It's missing tons of things I do all the time, like retrying on a failure, supervising workers, resource pools, etc.
In general, I started exploring solutions to these things in code over in my software-patterns repo. This library (stud) aims to be a well-tested, production-quality implementation of the patterns described in that repo.
For now, these all exist in a single repo because, so far, implementations of each 'pattern' are quite small by code size.
- retry on failure, with back-off, where failure is any exception.
- generic resource pools
- supervising tasks
- tasks (threads that can return values, exceptions, etc)
- interval execution (do X every N seconds)
- Make sure all things are documented. rubydoc.info should be able to clearly show folks how to use features of this library.
- Add tests to cover all supported features.