Re: Translators in Ruby

[Wolfgang Jährling]

Yoshinori K. Okuji <okuji@enbug.org> wrote:
> Wolfgang Jährling wrote:
> > I want to write translators in the Ruby programming language, so I thought
> > about what would need to be done to achive this.
> 
> I'm very happen to see a Ruby guru here. ;)

Well, not actually a guru, but an enthusiastic Ruby user.

> > - Ruby is not threadsave. When using Ruby and POSIX threads, the Ruby
> >   interpreter crashs badly.
> 
> IMHO, Ruby should be blamed here. Ruby needs not to be multithreaded,
> but it should take it into account to be used with a multithreaded
> environment. Probably as you know, that problem appears not only on
> the Hurd (e.g. also with multithreaded applications such as Apache
> 2.0).

I think you're right. Instead of programming around Rubys failures,
Ruby should be fixed. Unless it is fixed, we will limit ourself to
single threaded translators. Since it really is an important issue
for Ruby in general, it certainly will be fixed sooner or later.

> Is it possible to use SWIG for Hurd libraries? As the libraries are
> quite large, it would be easier to maintain wrappers with SWIG than to
> write everything in C. This might enable to share code with Perl
> extensions for Hurd.

From what I have seen so far (i.e. http://www.swig.org/tutorial.html)
this won't be possible, because Hurd libraries require you to define
certain functions which get called by the library. SWIG seems to provide
merely a wrapper for existing functions in a library. Of course you
could write a module that may be used by Ruby as well as Perl, Python
and other languages, but the problem that the result would be an
interface which is untypical for these languages remains. I doubt that
Ruby programmers would like to use a non-objectoriented interface. :)

Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang

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