From: Julian Snitow <vangczung@...>
Date: 2003-03-27T18:12:43+09:00
Subject: [Q]  Caveats of rb_global_variable() ?

Fellow Rubygoers,

For a program I'm working on, I wrote a nifty little class in C  (said 
class being a sort of specialized pseudo-Array for a very 
performance-sensitive loop), and all is well and wonderful, and the 
class does everything I'd hoped (and IMO ruby is wonderful to work with 
even on the C side of things...), but there are two places where I need 
to protect certain values from the Garbage Collector.

In the first case, I just made the value in question into an instance 
variable, since there's just one such value.

In the second case (method StatArray#[]= ), I use rb_global_variable( 
data_pointer + index )  to protect the stored VALUE from being culled by 
the GC.

It works, but is this a healthy practice?  I.e., am I keeping these 
values from being deallocated until the program terminates, and if so, 
is there a better way to ensure that the GC does not cull these 
referenced objects while the StatArray instance exists, but to allow 
normal garbage collection afterwards?

TIA,
Julian