intertwingly

I’ve made progress porting the PHP ibm_db2 extension to Ruby.  If you pick up the latest code and run it, you should now see

102 tests, 107 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

Some of the differences between Ruby and PHP (other than syntax):

• array and hash are separate types in Ruby, they are combined in PHP.
• some PHP functions, like strlen and strtoupper are methods in Ruby.
• more automatic coercion in PHP: for example, string concat converts both arguments to string.  String interpolation works fine in Ruby.
• false prints as a null string in PHP, and as false in Ruby.  false can’t be printf’ed using a %d format string in Ruby.
• in PHP error messages go to the output.  In Ruby, typically exceptions are thrown.

Interesting things found during testing:

• Ruby’s ALLOC doesn’t zero the storage.  This means that something that passes when run individually may fail when run as a part of a suite.
• Ruby does garbage collection instead of reference counting.  This means that connections may not be immediately closed, which can lead to deadlock.  For now, I have defined a teardown method that calls GC::start
• And my personal favorite: in Ruby, exit means exit.  Not only is the test case exited, but also the test suite, and even the entire rake process.