Later: a simple thread proxy

later.rb

# +Later+ is a typical object proxy built around a Thread. You pass it a block
# and it will start performing that task in a Thread. Later, you can call any
# method on the object and it will proxy the call to the return value from
# +Thread#value+ (which joins the thread).
#
# Example:
#
#   data = [
#     Later { open("http://google.com") },
#     Later { open("http://duckduckgo.com") },
#     Later { open("http://heroku.com") }
#   ]
#   puts data.map(&:size)
#
require 'thread'

class Later < BasicObject

  def initialize(*args, &block)
    @thread = ::Thread.new(*args, &block)
  end

  def method_missing(*args, &block)
    @thread.value.send(*args, &block)
  end

  def respond_to?(method)
    @thread.value.respond_to?(method)
  end

  def ==(obj)
    @thread.value == obj
  end

end

# Convenience method to call +Later.new+
def Later(*args, &block)
  Later.new(*args, &block)
end