Refactor live reloads to use Rack 3 streaming bodies

[ayushn21]

Refactor live reloads to use Rack 3 streaming bodies

[jaredcwhite]

I'm very excited about this @ayushn21! I remember feeling disappointed that I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get live reload via SSE to work sorta OK without tying up threads and making regular responses hang. With this new Rack 3 streaming approach, does that mean SSE could work on routes generally without sucking up all the Puma threads?

[ayushn21]

With this new Rack 3 streaming approach, does that mean SSE could work on routes generally without sucking up all the Puma threads?

Yes, that's the general idea. The same approach was possible with Rack 2 as well, just felt a bit hacky. Rack 3 has formally adopted the paradigm of bi-directional communication making something like this a lot easier. I really need to blog about this.

We'll still need to create a Thread of our own to free up the Puma thread, but I've got a few prototypes working so hopefully shouldn't be a massive problem.

In terms of doing this in production, that's probably still a bad idea with Puma. Since we're creating our own thread to free up the Puma thread, we're also responsible for managing it. In dev, that's not an issue since it's just one thread for live reload. In production, where there are multiple connections, it could all get unwieldy very quickly without proper thread management which is difficult at the best of times.

This is where Falcon shines actually because it uses Fibers and is incredible at switching between them. In that case we wouldn't have to worry about creating our own thread or anything, we can just let Falcon take care of everything.