What's up, RMers?

[kyonides]

In a previous post I had informed you of a bug present in Ruby 3.0. At least I thought it was only there and nowhere else. Sadly, I recently found out that is not the case.

Ever since version 3.0, the core development team thought it was nice to implement their Primitive pseudo variable in a couple of default methods. What I mean here is that instead of simply defining a CRuby function and then link it to Ruby via a rb_define_method call, they pretend to temporarily create a Primitive "class" that simply calls the C function directly. The function gets all the obvious parameters from Ruby plus a hidden context variable.

Why is that a HUGE problem for developers?

The answer is pretty easy. Standalone applications like MKXP or HiddenChest are now unable to call a simple file and directory collector method like Dir#glob or Dir#[] ever again.

How's that even possible?

Well, now such applications would need to include probably most of Ruby's files that had never been required in the 2.x series or even before that. Why? Because the irb or ruby interpreter's console (a MS-DOS like shell) still can access those Dir singleton methods.

I know Matz and his collaborators had been talking about implementing some special __C__ variable, now known as Primitive, to let us call CRuby functions directly. The thing is that instead of being an advantage, it has become a real nuisance for developers!