Ruby eventmachine and WIN32OLE

Question

I'm trying to use the WIN32OLE class in conjunction with the eventmachine library. The OLE library communicates fine with the program, but the minute I add the WIN32OLE_Event hook to the program, it doesn't. The events fire at unpredictable times (or often never). Removing my listen server implemented by eventmachine seems to make the events fire properly.

Does anyone have an idea why this is happening and how I can work around it? What other connection / socket managing libraries are there that could possibly replace eventmachine?

Answer 1

Turns out WIN32OLE is not thread safe and is up to the user to ensure it is only ever accessed by the thread that initialized it.