Re:Show HN: BreakerMachines – Modern Circuit Breaker for Rai...
by byroot on Thursday July 10, 2025 @04:21AM
(#44518617)
> 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
Re:Show HN: BreakerMachines – Modern Circuit Breaker for Rai...
by seuros on Thursday July 10, 2025 @06:35AM
(#44519428)
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.
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.