FFI and callbacks (was: RE: How Do You Do Business Apps?)

Raab, Andreas Andreas.Raab at disney.com
Sat Feb 26 09:26:03 UTC 2000


Andrew,

> I have worked rather closely with Python and Tkinter.  It was a gross 
> mess.  In my very early days, I planned as my first VM hack to do a 
> Tkinter extension.  The big difficulty is that Squeak makes it very, 
> very difficult to do callbacks, which are used extensively in 
> Tkinter.  My impression is that this is till a problem, even under 
> FFI.
> 
> Andreas, your comments?

Callbacks are currently not support in the FFI stuff. There is more than one
reason for it but for me the primary reason is that adding callbacks has
some serious implications on the general working of the VM - so I was trying
to avoid an (in my understanding unnecessary) complication for the
forthcoming J3. My basic feeling about this is that a working J3 is more
worth than any callback support for the FFI stuff... Also, in many cases you
can work around callbacks (e.g., Windows, MacOS and X11 all support polling
if you want to write your own window stuff).

I'm not saying that it'll never come - just not any time soon ;-)

  - A.





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