From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-10-29T01:10:00+09:00
Subject: Re: JRuby disabling ObjectSpace: what implications?

Bill Kelly wrote:
> I think I've used _id2ref exactly twice.  I can't recall the first
> usage; I don't think it made it into production code.  The most
> recent use was to store some ruby object id's in a separate C++
> process, which was able to fire an event back to ruby and provide
> the object id for the object to receive the event.
> 
> (I suppose DRb might do something similar?)

Yeah, sounds like that's mostly a "poor man's remote hash". I'd expect 
that just creating a hash specifically for that purpose and passing a 
key around would be a "better" way to do it.

_id2ref is just another one of those features that gets rarely used, and 
whose use cases can often be implemented in "better" ways.

- Charlie