On Tue 03 Aug, Richard L. Peskin wrote:
> At 10:33 PM -0400 8/3/99, agree at carltonfields.com wrote:
> > JUN relies quite heavily upon special provisions in VW for defining
> >C-types and for marshalling Smalltalk types to C and back again in
> >external library calls.  There is no corresponding facility yet in Squeak
> >--
> 
> Very true and a very significant shortcoming in Squeak.
We-ell, it's not actually quite as bad as it might seem, not now that we
have named external prims. It is quite easy (really!) to write a Plugin
subclass that interfaces to the library of your affections and it has some
advantages over the VW DLLCC stuff in that you _don't_ have to have all
that code to do type, define, variable and function handling. Plus, you can
have functions in your plugin that are simply there to speed things up.

Now, I'm not saying DLLCC is bad (after all I helped develop it many moons
ago) but it is a pretty heavy system to have around and takes quite a bit
of effort to support and port.

tim


-- 
Useful random insult:- Her modem lights are on but there's no carrier.
Tim Rowledge:  rowledge at interval.com (w)  +1 (650) 842-6110 (w)
 tim at sumeru.stanford.edu (h)  <http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim>