From: gga <GGarramuno@...>
Date: 2005-04-03T05:54:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Embedding Ruby Interpretor in threaded C / C++

Hi, Yogesh.  In ruby this is a tad worse, as there's basically no lock
of any kind so you can run into all sorts of race conditions.  You can
obviously do what python does by providing your own lock before you
eval any ruby code, but I agree this is far from ideal.
There's also always only a single instance of the ruby interpreter
(which cannot even be re-inited, unlike python), so all your scripts
will share their global variables.
These are limitations of the current ruby interpreter and not of the
language.  The ruby interpreter is being rewritten to address these
problems, but don't expect anything any time soon.

If you need to do any of the above today, I highly recommend you look
into either Lua or TCL, both of which can keep different interpreter
contexts easily.  Lua is still somewhat new but it does have a
relatively similar syntax to Ruby (at least as long as you don't do
much OO programming, where their OO model is a tad too cumbersome
compared to ruby or python).
If newer languages scare you, TCL is a very mature language which was
built with embedding in mind and has hundreds of libraries all around.
However, its syntax of brackets is a tad arcane. TCL was never built
with the idea of classes or advanced constructs in mind, so its
performance in that area is usually less than some more modern
languages.