[squeak-dev] Re: [Pharo-project] Alien & Squeak FFI issues on Snow Leopard.

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Wed Sep 30 18:19:55 UTC 2009


The reason for the SqueakPluginsBuiltInOrLocalOnly was to prevent the  
VM from looking in about 100 places for a plugin before deciding to  
use the one built into the VM
this saved several 10 of ms in launch time. At the time there was also  
a transition period between PowerPC and Universal plugins, the  
historical algorithm would try to load powerpc
plugins lying loose in a developer's various libraries, versus using  
the newly complied ones supplied by the VM.

So setting SqueakPluginsBuiltInOrLocalOnly to NO might lead to other  
interesting issues, versus for example doing a 'ln -s /usr/lib/ 
libc.dylib   libc.dylib  in the VM's resource folder.

I will look at changing sqMacUnixExternalPrims.c to allow absolute  
paths, and also consider the changes Ian made lately to reduce the  
amount of searching that the original UnixExternalPrims.c did.

On 2009-09-30, at 9:04 AM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

> Craig Latta found a simple work-around which is to set the VM's  
> Info.plist variable "SqueakPluginsBuiltInOrLocalOnly" to false, so  
> that libraries are found on Snow Leopard.  Up until now things have  
> been being found through vagaries if the Mac OS X dlopen call which  
> would, I think, search the paths in an executable used to find  
> dlls.  i.e. prior to Snow Leopard if you tried to run something in  
> libSystem.B.dylib and you traced the logic in  
> sqMacUnixExternalPrims.c you'd find that dlopen was "finding"  
> libSystem.B.dylib in VM.app/Contents/Resources, even though it is  
> not there.
>
> Personally I think that sqMacUnixExternalPrims.c is ripe for a  
> rewrite.  It is torturously complex.  But Craig's workaround works  
> for us and takes the pressure off.
>
> P.S.  I'm not on the Pharo list.  Can someone forward this for me?
--
= 
= 
= 
========================================================================
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:   
squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
= 
= 
= 
========================================================================







More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list