From: Yogesh Sharma <ysharma@...>
Date: 2005-04-03T23:35:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Embedding Ruby Interpretor in threaded C / C++

Hi gga,

Thanks for perfect answer and pointers to Lua and Tcl.

Yogesh

gga wrote:
> 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.
>