From: "Ara.T.Howard" <Ara.T.Howard@...>
Date: 2005-08-11T23:43:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Threading on Win32 - at an impasse

On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Bill Atkins wrote:

> Sure.  This solution might not work for everyone, because fortunately
> I don't really have to do much interprocess communication aside from
> being able to start and stop children at will.  So I have a simulation
> class:
>
> require 'win32/process'
>
> class Simulation
>  .... blah blah blah
>
>  def start
>    @pid = Process.run "ruby bin/run_device.rb #@dev_name #@name"
>  end
>
>  def kill
>    Process.kill 9, @pid if @pid
>    @pid = nil
>  end
>
>   .......blah blah blah
> end
>
> And the bin/run_device.rb file loads up the appropriate simulation and
> does its thing in the background.  run_device.rb is the important part
> - it is more or less my answer to Win32's lack of fork; it loads the
> library files it needs and then starts up the simulator, so it's as if
> I've forked the process, but not really. :)  run_device.rb's code is
> long and not too interesting (and application-dependent in any case),
> so I won't post it here.
>
> Process.run is a custom function that Does The Right Thing based on
> what OS the program is running on:
>
> module Process
>  def self.run app
>    if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /win32/
>      puts "calling create"
>      Process.create :app_name => app
>    else
>      puts "calling fork"
>      fork do
>        exec app
>      end
>    end
>  end
> end
>
> If only Microsoft would implement fork/exec........
>
> Sigh.
>
> Hope that helps,

it does - there is a win32-fork - guess you can't exec then?  i don't really
know the semantic difference between win fork and nix fork.

thanks alot for the example - i've faced this same issue before and gave up.
;-)

-a
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