On Monday 10 June 2002 06:24 am, Ricardo Bánffy wrote:

> What I meant is that it could be useful to make Squeak generate
> native windows IN ADDITION TO Squeak windows

Hasn't this been done already?

I remember some work a while ago (forget who did it) that just sent 
Windows events up via the usual event channel, and used DLL calls 
(via FFI?) for the Win API. I think.

I recall that it was very slow, but worked, mostly. Don't know how 
much it could do.

I think there's already functionality in Squeak to allow drawing on 
other kinds of display surfaces. So you could make display surface 
that implements bitBlt as using the GDI call to draw a DIBitmap.

Likewise, you could use native widgets more or less directly from 
Squeak if you made a plugin for this that would handle the 
Squeak-Windows mapping (deal with pointers, change integer formats, 
etc.).

User interaction could come up via the standard event channel (though 
we only have 6 bytes I think), or via another channel (using a 
Semaphore to block a Squeak event-handling Process). Callbacks that 
require synchronous handling might be a problem (since the plugins 
can't call back to Squeak, unfortunately).

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE