From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2004-03-15T03:23:20+09:00
Subject: Re: [ ANN] wxRuby 0.2.1 has been released!

Hello Sam,

Sunday, March 14, 2004, 3:59:30 AM, you wrote:

SR> Quoteing lists@zara.6.isreserved.com, on Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 11:10:19AM +0900:
>> Markus Jais wrote:
>> >very cool. 
>> >thanks for your work. let's hope that it will be as successful as wxPython.
>> 
>> I hate to say it but, as long as we're still using Ruby 1.x, it probably
>> won't be. Sometimes we just need real/OS threads, which won't be present
>> until Ruby2.

SR> I don't know much about gui programming, and nothing about wxWidgets.
SR> Could you explain why native threads are so important?

They are important for programming but you are right, they are not
very important for GUI programming. Most GUI Toolkits are not really
multithread safe, some offer a few hooks, but they do this because
they don't support fibers (cooperative threads like ruby).

In fact a good event loop implementation can have the same performance
as python at the moment. But this would require that for example
even file operations are also implemented as async operations.

I doubt that there are so many reasons for native threads, most of
them are only necessary for native C extensions.

TCL has a good implementation of threads and the only useful
for a script language. They separate the "threads" memory space
and only do event passing with marshal/unmarshal data. But most people
don't call this a 'thread implementation'.


-- 
Best regards,
 Lothar                            mailto:mailinglists@scriptolutions.com