From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2007-10-29T00:05:04+09:00
Subject: Re: SWIG / Ruby GC issues

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> redroofgreentree wrote:
>>   I have this really nasty SWIG/ruby GC issue. (Namely objects are being
>> freed when I don't want them to be freed).
>>
> 
> Well ... I guess I would start off by saying, "gdb is your friend". :) 
> But all SWIG does is generate wrapper/interface code between the Ruby 
> and the C or C++ code. Can you make this work without SWIG?

SWIG does help with memory management,; there's an unusually helpful 
section on GC in the SWIG docs, which repays close reading
http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Ruby.html#Ruby_nn57

You definitely need a debugger to identify what's getting prematurely 
destroyed, but once you have a stack trace which shows what method is 
being called on a deleted object, it's normally not hard to write a 
%markfunc to protect it

alex