From: Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@...>
Date: 2007-01-03T03:48:57+09:00
Subject: Re: System V IPC in standard library?

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> I think concurrency primitives are a fundamentally different beast than 
> Win32ole or syslog. Concurrency primitives should work reliably, 
> portably and efficiently everywhere the language is used, while Win32ole 
> is clearly only going to be used on Windows. Concurrency and language 
> features to support concurrency are a very big deal right now because of 
> the multi-core trend, and IMHO Ruby *has* to get this right or die a 
> painful death from lack of use! We have more than a lot of languages 
> have already -- Drb, Rinda, monitors and Starfish.

That's a reasonable point of view, but very Ruby-centric.

I'm not a big fan of SysV IPC, and I don't recommend its use in most 
applications. But there are times you need to interact with external 
applications not written in Ruby via existing (if platform-specific) 
mechanisms. No Ruby-specific apparatus can provide that.

I don't think the criterion should be universal availability, nor 
universal applicability. In my opinion, it should be that the utility 
outweighs the cost of inclusion. If the cost of inclusion is low, the 
utility threshold isn't very high.

Steve