[squeak-dev] External language support

Antony Blakey antony.blakey at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 22:18:42 UTC 2008


On 05/12/2008, at 7:13 AM, jordi inglada wrote:

> Thank you all for the answers. I had a look at FANN and even asked  
> the developer of the Squeak bindings, but, as far as I understand,  
> it is not easy at all to proceed using FFI.
>
> Since I wanted to wrap a library containing several thousands of  
> classes using advanced template features, I guess I will have to  
> find another solution.

I've uses gccxml for this purpose in VisualWorks. I reified the gccxml  
output as ST objects, and then used them to generate the DLLCC  
methods. I subsequently abandoned that and switched to clang, because  
I was already using llvm and was interested in using llvm to jit FFI  
stubs that did the mediation. Described on my blog starting here:

   http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/antony/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Generating_cross-platform_high_performance_native_code_in_VisualWorks.&entry=3372121629

and a comment about gccxml here:

   http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/antony/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Seaweed:_whats_wrong_with_GCCXML&entry=3372431209

Anyway, if you have a generic and ongoing requirement, I would  
recommend clang, with the caveat that I'm not sure of the current  
state of it's advanced C++ template handling. Failing that, you may  
have success with gccxml.

Antony Blakey
-------------
CTO, Linkuistics Pty Ltd
Ph: 0438 840 787

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
   -- J. M. Barre





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