[PATCH 0/2] ruby: enable garbage collection

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

Ruby is a gc language, we shouldn't be doing workaround to free memory when Ruby is perfectly
capable of doing so.

The problem is that talloc wants to be smart, and Ruby and talloc both fight to free memory. We can
let Ruby win by stealing all the objects from talloc control.

Thanks to the previous cleanup patches it's now possible to easily do this.

In order to test this series I've used the following script:

  require 'notmuch'

  $db = Notmuch::Database.new(ENV['HOME'] + '/mail')
  $do_destroy = true

  while true
    query = $db.query('')
    threads = query.search_threads
    threads.each do |thread|
      puts '%s: %s' % [thread.thread_id, thread.subject]
      thread.destroy! if $do_destroy
    end
    threads.destroy! if $do_destroy
    query.destroy! if $do_destroy
  end

  $db.close

All threads from the database are fetched over and over with no significant increase in memory.

The old method of destroying objects with destroy! still works, but now it's not necessary.

I tried other methods, like increasing the reference counter and adding a second parent to talloc
objects, but for some reason they didn't work. I investiged why but couldn't reach any conclussion.
On the other hand the talloc_steal approach works perfectly fine.

Felipe Contreras (2):
  ruby: create an actual wrapper struct
  ruby: enable garbage collection using talloc

 bindings/ruby/database.c |  2 +-
 bindings/ruby/defs.h     | 42 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-----
 bindings/ruby/extconf.rb |  1 +
 bindings/ruby/init.c     |  6 ++++++
 4 files changed, 45 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

-- 
2.31.1