From: Patrick Hurley <phurley@...>
Date: 2006-06-21T05:17:15+09:00
Subject: Re: C Threads and Ruby

On 6/20/06, Paul Brannan <pbrannan@atdesk.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:39:53AM +0900, Patrick Hurley wrote:
> > That is not true, it is completely possible to use an OS level
> > mutex/critical section etc, from inside a "green" Ruby thread. It will
> > block all Ruby threads which is not very nice, but I do not know of a
> > better solution.
>
> TRAP_BEG and TRAP_END work well for allowing Ruby to switch threads,
> though the call between them must be interruptible.  I believe this
> should be true of sem_wait(), though I've been unsuccessful interrupting
> it on linux.
>
> I typically use a pipe for this kind of synchronization.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
>

I would agree a pipe is generally better; however, in my case it was
against a Win32 API that required the use of threads. Now I am curious
about TRAP_BEG/TRAP_END. Is it safe to access rb_XXX methods from
inside a TRAP_BEG/TRAP_END block not in the ruby interpreter thread?
If so that would make some things much easier.

Thanks
pth