Greetings,
I tried to integrate Squeak to a C based application more
than six years ago. The project failed because we were not
able to have our application call Squeak, then have Squeak
call the application, and then the application call Squeak
again recursively. An analysis of the Squeak VM revealed a
kernel design consisting of a lot of global variables - quite
unnecessarily. The unnecessary use of global variables over a
localized structure for example unnecessarily prevented the
use of Squeak as an extension language (unless you had no
recursion). I spent several days trying to re-structure the
Squeak kernel but I kept running into problems and just ran
out of time.
As a side note, that company I was with ended up making a
lot of investment in Scheme because we were easily able to
integrate that language with our application. Now, not only
is Scheme used heavily within that company but many of their
clients use it too to customize their application.
This brings me to my question, is COG reentrant? If not,
as the author of COG, I would think it relatively easy to
restructure it to be so. Such a design capability can make a
huge difference to COG's acceptance to many. It may even be
the reason to switch to COG.
Just sharing some thoughts. Thanks.
Blake McBride