CCD data acquisition & Squeak

Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se
Wed Sep 13 10:07:38 UTC 2000


Kevin,

in my experience, FFI is invaluable for developing a Squeak interface to an
external library. While apparently SqC has political concerns with it (which
I don't think I agree with), using regular plugin code to the kind of
exploratory programming you need for these things is almost impossible.
After all, the reason we love Smalltalk is that we don't have to regen
sources, quit Squeak, run the C compiler, start Squeak again, and run our
code again, each time we find a bug. (Especially when you need to write code
to figure out why the library doesn't work like the interface spec says it
should.) In short, FFI allows you to do Smalltalk-style development, while
the plugin style requires traditional compile-link-etc. style.

So using FFI is essential for this. Once you're done you can of course write
some plugin code rather quickly. It is somewhat difficult to handle complex
data structures via FFI, however. But this has more to do with the problem
of reconciling the "GC moves objects" style of memory handling with the
traditional C one. If the data you are dealing with is simple (in terms of
how complex the C declarations are) then you are well off. If it's not,
well, at least its not easier with plain plugins.

Henrik






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