From: Tim Uckun <timuckun@...>
Date: 2006-07-05T13:18:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and windows.

In my case I have an existing infrastructure where a "master" server
instantiates a series of activeX dlls and communicates with them via
events. The DLLs are now written in VB and I was thinking it would be
nice to rewrite them in Ruby.


On 5/15/06, Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>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
> >
> >
>
>