From: Fitzberg Brian <efushigi@...>
Date: 2002-02-14T16:47:29+09:00
Subject: Re: restarting interpreter, undefining objects..?

> Could you fake this multiple processes?  That is,
> fork off a child process when a plug-in is loaded?  

I thought about this a bit, and actually considered trying
it out until I discovered that there doesn't seem to be a
fork() equivalent in NT - if I'm really desperate I guess
I'll start looking into NT processess.

This all seems overly complicated, though, when all I want
to do is something seemingly simple.  I'm _almost_ tempted
to delve into the ruby code itself and see if I can
implement a reset/reinitialize function, or somehow figure
out how to stop ruby killing the calling app when I shut
it down.  I don't have a lot of time, though.  If it
weren't for this simple yet fundamental problem, ruby
would be _perfect_ for a dynamic, plug-in architecture.

I tried doing something sneaky, but ran into some weird
bugs:

- load the plug-in (using rb_require)
- instantiate object, call member functions, etc.
- load a dummy plug-in (using rb_require), which overides
all the previous plug-in object's methods.  Unfortunately,
this does not get rid of member objects, which is unsafe
of course
- load the new plug-in, again using rb_require

Now, the interesting thing here is that it works,
_sometimes_.. for some weird reason, the rb_requires fail,
giving me :

<script name>: No such file to load -- myplug.rb
(LoadError)

The weird thing is that $LOAD_PATH remains unchanged
throughout.. I put in a pile of puts $LOAD_PATH
everywhere, even right before I attempt the failing
rb_require, and it's always the same (and correct) - I
don't understand why it suddenly fails.

> If you're on NT I'm useless to you, but from a
> recent Rubygarden poll statistics are on my side.

Unfortunately, I'm on NT, and I don't have much choice in
the matter.  <sigh>  (Although, the project is supposed to
be as cross-platform as possible.  So far there is no
platform-specific code, which would be one of the nice
advantages to using a scripting language like ruby for the
plug-ins.)


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