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I appreciate your comment. We did EventMachine in C++ for some particular
reasons: Performance and scalability of course, but also we learned (the
hard way) that Ruby's implementations of network i/o are not as well-behaved
as we'd hoped. (So what does that borderline-provocative statement actually
mean :-)? I think that Ruby attempts to be very good about wrapping up the
details, so it handles normal cases very well, but there are some subtle
edge conditions that come up in production network applications that Ruby
doesn't expose. And they cause trouble. I'm used to writing single-process,
single-thread network servers that can handle thousands of users, and run
for months or years without restarting or throwing exceptions.)

All that said, I recognize the pain-in-the-neck resulting from having to
compile the extension. Does it make you any more comfortable if we release
binary versions for all the various platforms? Another thing we could do
easily enough is backport the code from C++ to C. Would that help? And
finally, are you writing for Windows, Mac or Solaris (where compilers are
generally not available) or Linux or BSD (where they often are)?

On 5/9/06, Daniel Harple <dharple / generalconsumption.org> wrote:
>
> On May 9, 2006, at 2:34 PM, Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
>
> > On another thread ("Considering Ruby for a Network Application), Giles
> > Bowkett made reference to the "Twisted" application framework
> > available to
> > Python programmers, and that got me thinking. How many of you are
> > familiar
> > with Twisted or have used it to develop an application? I'd like to
> > know if
> > there is any interest among Rubyists in having such a well-elaborated
> > event-handling framework for Ruby.
> >
> > I recently released a single-threaded reactor-based library called
> > "EventMachine," which could form the basis for a more complete
> > framework.
> > [...]
> > Comments? Complaints? Wish-lists? Anyone wanna help?
>
> I think you will find a lot of interest, but IMO it would be best for
> the lib to be wrote in Ruby instead of C++.
>
> This recent interest in event-driven networking is an odd
> coincidence, since I am currently writing a networking app, and I was
> going to roll my own base for it. I looked at using EventMachine, but
> I have decided not to because it requires a C++ compiler.
>
> -- Daniel
>
>

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