From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2001-12-19T23:46:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28911] A Ruby programmer walked into a bar ...

Now that I have your attention :-) ...

Recently, there have been two threads that asked why an example from
Programming Ruby ran fine under Linux but hung completely under Windows.

I half expected to see an immediate response from one of the many gurus
on this list saying something like "Ah, no.  You haven't installed Ruby
properly; try this." or something similar.  But no real answer was provided, at
least not that I saw.

A little investigation shows that what appears to be happening is that
the first of two threads that is created has taken complete control of
the CPU, thus starving the main thread and not allowing any further
processing.

You may feel I'm being a little alarmist, but I think that if I were a
Windows programmer and found that such a trivial multithreaded program
seemed to fail completely in my working environment, I'd be a little
worried.

The real problem I see with this is that it would seem that something
that is intended to be a standard part of Ruby (ie, OS-independent
multithreading) doesn't work as one would expect on at least one OS, and
certainly is not consistent across OSes.

Yes, I know ... "The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!" :-).

If someone is willing to address this issue, I promise to at least
*attempt *to come up with a punchline for the original subject line !!