From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2009-06-15T02:30:58+09:00
Subject: Re: C extension: VALUEs being collected too early


On Jun 13, 2009, at 21:39 , eden li wrote:

> I'm writing a C extension which passes around structs that refer to
> Ruby VALUEs.  During the course of execution, these VALUEs are
> assigned new Ruby strings, hashes or arrays (via the rb_{str,hash,ary)
> _new functions) through a series of callbacks.  The problem is that it
> seems they're getting collected too early before I have a chance to
> use the result.
>
> I tried a few things to keep these VALUEs around (including calling
> rb_gc_mark directly on these objects), but the only thing that seems
> to prevent this early collection is by disabling the GC while my code
> is executing.

See "3.3 Encapsulate C data into a Ruby object" in README.EXT in the  
ruby source distribution.