From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2007-01-04T01:41:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Problem in Unit Testing Methods that start new threads

On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Mat Schaffer wrote:

>
> Ara's right on this one.  It's a race condition.  But it looks like you're 
> interested in checking that the thread has indeed started.  If I were to 
> write something like this I would probably have the unit test run 
> @foo.new_thread_start and immediately sleep waiting for a signal from the 
> child thread.  The child thread would then signal back to the any waiting 
> threads that it had set it's thread status to true.  Altough the more I 
> ponder it, the more I feel like I've just moved the race condition to the 
> sleep call.  I'll have to review my concurrent programming texts a bit. 
> Seems like you should do the same.
>
> Either way, check out Monitor for some insight:
> http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/monitor/rdoc/index.html
>
> -Mat

good idea mat.  it's easy in ruby too:

   require 'thread'

   q = Queue.new

   Thread.new{
     q.push :running
     # run
   }

   q.pop # wait for thread to start...

regards.

-a
-- 
if you find yourself slandering anybody, first imagine that your mouth is
filled with excrement.  it will break you of the habit quickly enough. - the
dalai lama