From: Ned Konz <ned@...>
Date: 2002-07-02T09:16:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Gvim interface to the ruby debugger?

On Monday 01 July 2002 04:28 pm, Gray, Jeff wrote:
> Since this thread made the Ruby Weekly News wrap-up, I feel obliged
> to follow-up...  :^)

Sure! It still needs to be done...

> Best I can see, named pipes would limit the solution to
> Unix-esque platforms. 'mkfifo' under my Cygwin installation returns
> a "Function not implemented" error -- I take this to mean that it's
> simply not supported in Windows.

No, that means that it's not supported in Cygwin.

Windows/NT provides named pipes; the DOS versions of Windows don't, 
but who cares?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ipc/pipes_94xf.asp

At the NT level, it's just CreateNamedPipe followed by 
ConnectNamedPipe. After a client connects, you just do ordinary 
ReadFile and WriteFile calls.

Now, this is more complicated than just mkfifo/read/write, but you 
could make a simple named-pipe server that would wait for a 
connection on a given pipe, and then just connect the pipe to its 
stdin/stdout (or a socket). You'd then start the NP server from Ruby 
and read/write from/to it.

Anyway, named pipes aren't needed if you can get the client/server 
communications working (see below).

> > The catch is that you can't do "normal" file operations in VimL.
> > You can read a whole file, of course, and you can write or read
> > to pipes or files.
>
> I did find a Gvim gdb interface on vim.sourceforge.net; it builds
> the fifo rd/wr operations into a C lib which is called from Vim. 
> Again, I would like to keep the solution entirely in Ruby/VimL
> source.  See

Actually, you can just use the Vim server stuff (:he clientserver) 
directly from Ruby. I started work on the X11 interface to Ruby, but 
ran into a problem with Ruby/X11, and I'm waiting for a response from 
matju.

Under windows, this might also work (you have to send and receive 
Windows messages). I don't know what's required to spin off a thread 
that creates a window and processes messages to & from it, and then 
talk to Ruby.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE