From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2009-02-13T16:33:38+09:00
Subject: Re: If you are unhappy with the direction of Ruby 1.8.7+, respond

Urabe Shyouhei wrote:
> Alex Fenton wrote:
>>> We know the Rails issue (and solved), but could you elaborate on
>>> issues with wxRuby and SWIG?
>> http://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2034216&group_id=1645&atid=101645
> 
> This is not our fault.  Please hold on and think yourself.  GC is running means
>   ruby interpreter is running out of memory.  It is as clear as day that object
> allocation during GC is not doable, because we do not have any memory space.
> 
> So SWIG had a bug. 1.8.7 helped to find it out.

Thanks. I perfectly understand the reason for the change, although the 
old behaviour worked fine in practice and libraries (not just SWIG ones) 
relied on it. It can be seen "fixing broken behaviour" though IMHO 
changing expectations of how GC works would better have been left for 
1.8->1.9 transition.

My concern about 1.8.7 has always been more that code written for 1.8.7 
is not necessarily compatible with 1.8.6, not the other way around - and 
to a much greater degree than previous .x releases. The problem is with 
expected and actual meaning of version numbers, not the code itself.

Anyway, I'm not going to stop using ruby just because it has an 
idiosyncratic versioning scheme. Thanks to all for a useful and mostly 
temperate discussion.

alex