From: Lyle Johnson <ljohnson@...>
Date: 2002-03-22T00:46:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Windows version of Ruby (proposals)

> I'd add a number of other issues.
>
> - Threading doesn't work correctly
> - $? doesn't work in all circumstances
> - File mode stuff is strange
> - the 'cmd /c' prefixing of stuff run with system is inconsistent

This is the first time I remember seeing someone (other than me) note that
threads don't work quite right for the Visual C++ build of Ruby. Has this
problem been discussed and/or documented in the past? Sometime soon I was
facing the dread task of building a debug version of Ruby on Windows and
stepping through the code in the debugger. It would be nice if someone else
has already investigated the problem to some degree.

My specific problem is that the code in FXRuby's event loop that
periodically releases control to Ruby's thread scheduler eventually locks up
the interpreter, when you're running the Visual C++ versions of Ruby and
FXRuby. You can see this in the "groupbox.rb" example program distributed
with FXRuby, which uses a thread to update the "clock" label that appears in
the lower right-hand side of that example's main window. However, the same
code works properly under Linux and the Cygwin build of Ruby/FXRuby on
Windows.