From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-05-14T21:21:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and windows.

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>>>It would be really, really nice once the Ruby interpreter is thread safe
:)
Just by way of clarification, are you referring to the fact that Ruby
doesn't share synchronization primitives with the native platform? I've
given that some thought recently and it may be possible to accomplish with =
a
patch to Ruby's thread.rb. What's the point of it, however? Are you trying
to make it so a container can spin multiple COM threads and each thread can
access Ruby objects without any cooperation from Ruby's interpreter?

More broadly (and I'm asking this out of curiosity, not tendentiously):
what's the point of being able to write a DLL in Ruby? Are people looking
for the ability to write CLR programs that include components written in a
variety of different languages? And is there some reason to do this apart
from retaining compatibility with already-written stuff? If you did this,
how much of Ruby's metaprogramming would you have to give up, in order to
get a statically-enforceably contract that could be expressed as a COM
interface? I can imagine a more loosely-coupled way of achieving the same
thing.

Sorry I'm not really contributing anything but more questions with this
post, but I'm trying to understand the questions that have already been
posed.

On 5/14/06, John Lam <drjflam@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In principle, this isn't hard to make happen. I could imagine a
> universal delegator approach where you cruft up a generic
> implementation of IDispatch and use Ruby's reflection capabilities to
> find methods to call. The only wierd stuff that you might have to
> worry about is mapping named parameters and marshaling SAFEARRAYS.
>
> The tougher thing is dealing with threading / apartment model
> compatibility. You could probably only make the STA threading model
> work for the generic case of a single STA in a process due to Ruby not
> being thread safe.
>
> In RubyCLR I have to worry about the case where multiple STA threads
> attempt to call into Ruby - my proxies have to disallow the method
> call and raise a CLR exception.
>
> It would be really, really nice once the Ruby interpreter is thread safe
> :)
>
> -John
> http://www.iunknown.com
>
>

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