[wxruby-users] object allocation during garbage collection phase

[Alex Fenton]

Hi Niklas

Niklas Baumstark wrote:
> Hello,
>
> when i run the bigdemo sample, the app crashes initially after opening the "tip of the day" (it doesn't when i don't touch mouse and keyboard). can't even get to the main window. i ran it in gdb, it gives me the following trace:
>
> Starting program: /usr/local/bin/ruby bigdemo.rb
> [Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
> [New Thread 0xb7c3ab60 (LWP 7428)]
> bigdemo.rb:591: [BUG] object allocation during garbage collection phase
> ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-02 revision 0) [i686-linux]
>
>
> Program received signal SIGABRT, Aborted.
> [Switching to Thread 0xb7c3ab60 (LWP 7428)]
> 0xb7ef2410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
> (gdb) whe
> #0  0xb7ef2410 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
> #1  0xb7c66085 in raise () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
> #2  0xb7c67a01 in abort () from /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6
> #3  0xb7e3a1e2 in rb_bug (
>     fmt=0xb7ec62e8 "object allocation during garbage collection phase")
>     at error.c:213
...

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to report this in detail with a 
backtrace. It's much appreciated.
> $ ruby -v
> ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-02 revision 0) [i686-linux]
>
> don't know if this is a bug, maybe its my own fault. i don't really need the bigdemo so it's no problem for me, but maybe the wxruby devs are interested.

No, it's not your fault, and it's not our fault either. With 1.8.7, the 
ruby developers chose to change both the public APIs and aspects of the 
GC/memory management internals. This broke any SWIG-generated ruby 
libraries that use certain SWIG features (object tracking). IMO this was 
a sloppy decision on a stable branch that reflects badly on ruby's 
development process, but - there we are.

Anyway, I recently committed a set of patches that I think fixed this 
problem for Ruby 1.9, which has the same problem. If you're willing to 
test this out from wxRuby's SVN with ruby 1.8.7 that would be very kind.

cheers
alex