i have recently built a small squeak plugin written in c to communicate 
and execute some c code for both windows (dll) and macosx(.bundle). i 
am using named primitives <primitive: module:> and everything works 
just fine. now i am really curious as to how different the named 
primitive method is to <apicall: module:> . i was able to find a little 
info on google about apicall but nothing that directly stated any 
differences between apicall and the named primitive method.

at first glance it would seem to me that the apicall method does not 
require creating a c wrapper to communicate with the interpreterProxy 
like the named primitve method does. i can easily infer this by looking 
at the ffi smalltalk classes and looking at all of the win32 api calls 
that i am familiar with.

since i am doing everything in c to begin with, compiling my plugins, 
and just writing a simple smalltalk interface that inherits from 
InterpreterPlugin, it seems that i would be better off using the 
apicall method. i notice that the osx apicalls go to frameworks on 
panther at least, but this is not a problem.

so i have a couple questions that i would be grateful for someone to 
either answer for me or point at some documentation that might explain 
it.

1) am i correct in assuming that i can directly call any c function 
that resides in a dll or framework from squeak by simply doing 
<apicall: module:> without having to recompile any part of the vm?

2)how are datatypes mapped to each other from smalltalk to c in the 
apicall method? pointers, structures, a two dimensional array ( int** 
myIntPointers)? and then how are they returned where squeak knows what 
they are? i know the primtive method uses the interpreterProxy.

3)other than not having to write the primitive wrappers, are there any 
other advantages to using apicall over named primitives? is it faster?

thanks in advance, i hope that am not asking for too much information 
but i have not been able to find what i want to know from anywhere 
else.

ps: i do not want to touch or recompile anything that has to do with 
the vm. what i have done so far with named primitives has prevented me 
from having to recompile anything else but the code for plugin, which 
is what i want.

jamie