>At 11:22 PM -0800 1/21/02, John M McIntosh wrote:
>>>Is the FFI plugin for OS X available somewhere? I saw a message 
>>>from John McIntosh saying he'd built one, but I don't see it 
>>>anywhere I know to look.
>>>
>>>In the absence of a prebuilt FFI plugin, does anyone know how to 
>>>build this plugin using Project Builder? Yesterday I managed to 
>>>build a functional VM under Project Builder (thanks to all who 
>>>contributed to making this relatively easy and documenting it!) 
>>>but the FFI plugin has code that seems specific to (I'm guessing) 
>>>CodeWarrior.
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>
>>>-Martin
>>
>>I think the issue was how about one for Carbon.
>>
>>However the issue now is what about building one for Project Builder.
>
>For right now, I'll take any FFI plugin that will run under OS X. 
>We're proceeding with the Flying Karamazov Brothers' project, and 
>deploying my Squeak app on OS X is a possibility. I need to come up 
>with the basic feasibility of running my video input drivers (which 
>use FFI, at least for now)  on OS X ASAP.

Well the short answer is there is no FFI plugin available that will 
work with the current carbon VM under os-x (as far as I know). 
However have you considered how much work it would be to code up a 
plugin front end for the video drivers? This might be faster than 
getting the FFI stuff to work. Right now we'd need to see if we go 
the route of the libffi or the old macintosh interface (which I doubt 
would work). But I don't see libffi for bsd anywhere? Back to 
considering a plugin?

Project Builder is a gui front end to the underlying GNU tools. It's 
*painless* to use for macintosh people, driving them into gnumake if 
they've never done unix programming before is a bit much. Right now I 
can expect a hypercard programmer to be able to compile the VM and 
actually understand what's and or how to drop a plugin if he doesn't 
want it. I'm not sure I could say the same if he had to mess with a 
make file.

Right now mac programming is a bit werid, we've the unix folks on 
this side, the mac folks on the other and we're attempting to 
understand how to mesh software together, for example I dropped all 
the mac specific image file io logic for the unix stuff, less code 
better performance.


PS I'm always interested in paid macintosh work, especially if I have 
to dig thru my assembler manuals. However I'll raise this topic 
higher on my list of things to do, but I fear it has a non-trival 
solution, but I won't know that until I finishing building this new 
block closure VM that others are snapping at the bit for so to speak.

Hint what about a plugin heh? I took about a day to do the TIFFLIB 
library, quite a mindless task once you get into it.

Oh and I need that applescript plugin, that no-one yet has asked for.
-- 
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
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