[Libguestfs] Re: [PATCH nbdkit] Remove nbdkit-ruby-plugin and Ruby language support completely

> This strategy fails completely if you have threads. In a thread > (using a different stack entirely) it scans randomly across the heap, > resulting in weird behaviour at best, but more usually straight > crashes. Urgh, horrible. > > We've had a Ruby plugin for a long time, but it broke with Ruby 1.9, > when Ruby changed from some kind of cooperative threading to using > native threads (and therefore separate stacks). > > The tests have been disabled since early 2018 (nbdkit < 1.2). I > re-enabled the tests just now (Ruby 3.3) but it's broken in the same > way as ever. > > The only changes that have happened since the tests were disabled are > mechanical ones / project-wide cleanups. > > It currently crashes in open(). > > It seems highly unlikely that anyone is using this plugin. IIUC, the '--threads' arg is just a per-client limit. So if there are multiple clients, you'll still get many threads using ruby even with "--threads = 1".

If spawning nbdkit with --single though, you'll get a separate process per client, and then with --threads=1, you could can sure that only 1 thread is calling into ruby. Is there a way a plugin can declare that it is non-threadsafe, and thus allow nbdkit to refuse to run it without --single and --threads=1, being set ?

I guess that will complicate your test suite though unless you can skip all tests which rely on multi-connections and threads.