From: Hisham Muhammad <hisham.hm@...>
Date: 2006-06-12T05:34:50+09:00
Subject: Validity of local VALUEs

Hi,

I've been wondering about the lifetime of Ruby objects declared from C
functions. Assume I create a new object through the C API (say, with
rb_class_new_instance or rb_ary_new) without exporting it to Ruby or
marking it as a global with rb_global_variable. I would expect that
this object might be garbage-collected during the execution of my C
function, making the VALUE invalid. I tried to write a small test case
that caused this:

#include <ruby.h>

static VALUE a_class;
static ID a_method_ID;

static VALUE a_method(VALUE self) {
   VALUE an_object;
   VALUE will_i_get_this;
   int i;

   /* Create a Ruby object, but don't bind it anywhere */
   an_object = rb_class_new_instance(0, NULL, a_class);
   rb_iv_set(an_object, "@an_attribute", rb_str_new2("42"));

   /* Cause some garbage collection cycles */
   for (i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
      VALUE some_garbage = rb_ary_new();
      rb_ary_push(some_garbage, rb_str_new2("666"));
      /* Looking at the object counts, gc is really happening */
      rb_eval_string("print 'objects: ', ObjectSpace.each_object {}, '\n'");
   }

   /* I'd expect an_object to have been collected by now */
   will_i_get_this = rb_iv_get(an_object, "@an_attribute");
   fprintf(stderr, "The answer is %s.\n", RSTRING(will_i_get_this)->ptr);
}

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
   VALUE an_instance;
   ruby_init();
   a_class = rb_define_class("RubyGcTest", rb_cObject);
   rb_define_method(a_class, "a_method", a_method, 0);
   an_instance = rb_class_new_instance(0, NULL, a_class);
   a_method_ID = rb_intern("a_method");
   rb_funcall2(an_instance, a_method_ID, 0, NULL);
   ruby_finalize();
   return 0;
}

I would expect this to crash, but it doesn't. Looking at the object
counts returned by ObjectSpace.each_object, I can see that several gc
cycles are taking place. However, an_object is still valid by the end
of the function. Is this working "by chance"? From the observation
that I don't have 100000 array objects in the ObjectSpace after
calling rb_ary_new 100000 times, I gather that VALUEs do not remain
valid until the end of the function without being bound somewhere.
However, my calls to an_object are still returning the correct value.

Thanks in advance,

-- Hisham