From: Bryan Richardson <btricha@...>
Date: 2008-08-13T07:34:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Non-Threaded Timeout?

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the reply.  I hate Windows. :)

I did a few tests (all-be-it I came up with the tests, so that might
be the problem) and it does seem like IO.popen is blocking...

IO.popen "ruby -e 'sleep(20); STDERR.puts \"Popped!\"'"
sleep(10)
puts "Hello"
sleep(15)
puts "Hi"

Output was:
Popped!
Hello
Hi

I CAN'T CATCH A BREAK ANYWHERE!!!!  Argh... this is why I don't
develop on Windows! :(

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 3:07 PM, Bill Kelly <billk@cts.com> wrote:
> I'm just jumping into the middle of the thread, so apologies if
> I've missed something; but ...
>
> popen blocks ALL ruby threads on windows.  This has been the bane
> of my existence for the past eight years.  :)
>
> The problem is due to Microsoft's venerable design strategy: You are
> lost in a twisty little maze of API's, all incompatible.
>
> On Windows, the "file handle" returned by popen is not a "socket",
> and therefore is incompatible with "select".
>
> /me raises a cup of hemlock in toast to Redmond
>
>
> Note: Now that 1.9 ruby uses native threads, it should be possible
> to implement a nonblocking popen.  However, last time I tested 1.9
> for this behavior, it still blocked.  (This was several months ago.)
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Bill
>
>
>
>