From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2004-03-18T02:00:11+09:00
Subject: Re: guis and native threads (was: [ ANN] wxRuby 0.2.1 has been released!)

Quoteing mailinglists@scriptolutions.com, on Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 08:31:36PM +0900:
> But now they must support it. There are to many important blocking
> libraries they must use. Oracles DB driver has a non blocking
> interface but AFAIK there is nothing for MySQL or Interbase
> and i'm 100% that there is nothing like this for Sqllite.

Ok, I start to see. Most of the demand that I've seen for "real"/os
native threads seemed to be based around the assumption that they
were in some way "better" than ruby's threads, based around io
multiplexing. It wasn't very convincing.

The Sqllite API is a lot more convincing! So, in summary,
native threads are useful for writing C extensions to:

- blocking APIs, like you mention above

- APIs that use threads as part of their interface -- doesn't gnome/gtk
  make extensive use of threading?

With a blocking API, couldn't you write an extension module that did
its work in a thread, notifying the main thread when the work was done?

Sam