[Rubydotnet-developer] Garbage collection - again

[Thomas S. <th...@th...>]

Hi,

If you follow the ruby-talk mailing list you may have noticed that I have
asked around about garbage collection, because I sometimes get a core dump
that seems to be related to garbage collection on either the .net or ruby
side.

When I pass a ruby object by reference to .net I wrap it up in a .net object
that has a constructor and a finalizer that takes care of 'locking' the ruby
object so it is not reaped by the ruby gc:

public __gc class Object : public DynamicLanguageSupport::IObject {
public:
    explicit Object(VALUE handle) {
        _handle = ALLOC(VALUE);
        *_handle = handle;
        rb_gc_register_address(_handle);
    }

    ~Object() {
        rb_gc_unregister_address(_handle);
        free(_handle);
    }

    // stuff for invoking ruby methods from .net removed

    private:
    VALUE __nogc *_handle;
};

I just grepped through your code and you don't seem to use the
rb_gc_(register|unregister)_address functions. Do you know another trick for
keeping the ruby GC from reaping the ruby objects that are only referenced
from .net?

Btw, I have just thought of something! The .net GC runs asynchronously and
the finalizer may just be invoked on a bad time causing everything to bomb
because ruby is not thread safe.

Cheers,

Thomas