From: Paul Brannan <paul@...>
Date: 2001-12-14T02:44:43+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28440] Re: [RCR] IO.select should return array for timeout.

On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 02:30:24AM +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> Hmm... (thinking) ... Maybe I was wrong.  I thought explicit timeout
> check was rare case so that empty arrays are sufficient.

Well, if I really didn't want to take an action when the timeout
occurred, then I wouldn't have specified a timeout value :)

I think, though, that using select() directly in Ruby is not a good idea
anyway, since it doesn't allow me to arbitrarily combine components and
have them share the same select() loop.  A better solution is to use a
Reactor or something similar, like ACE has:
  http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/PDF/reactor-rules.pdf

Then I can pass the reactor around to objects that want to respond to IO
objects, register my read, write, and error callbacks, register my
timers, and enter the event loop.

The solution that is generally used in Ruby is to just have multiple
threads (and from what I can tell, that just boils down to a single
select() call anwhow, which is sorta cool), but in my experience this
solution does not play well with extensions sometimes (and raises all
sorts of synchronization issues).

Paul