[squeak-dev] offscreen buffer/bitmap/array access

Lawson English lenglish5 at cox.net
Mon Feb 1 13:43:31 UTC 2010


David T. Lewis wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 04:49:58AM -0700, Lawson English wrote:
>   
>> I've managed to work up a trivial access to the shm*   calls in Mac OS X 
>> so that I can obtain a pointer to a shared memory buffer. How can I 
>> render to this buffer without more c-level programming? The goal would 
>> be to take the shared memory address and use it to build various things 
>> like bitmaps, forms, etc. I've spent several hours rummaging around with 
>> google and searching the various squeak-related mailing lists, but there 
>> doesn't seem to be any Squeak way to draw to/write to an offscreen 
>> buffer which is only defined by an external address. Certainly, with far 
>> more work, I can devise ways to do this with FFI/plugins/etc but I'd 
>> like to prototype in smalltalk, not C.
>>     
>
> The SurfacePlugin (in VMMaker package) forms the basis for a number
> of plugins that do this sort of thing, and this recent posting by Josh
> Gargus may be of some help:
>
>   http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-January/003820.html
>
> Dave
>
>
>
>   
Thanks. That's exactly what I need (I hope).

It seems to me that shared buffers will also be useful for other kinds 
of IPC. I've seen some reference to the Hydra VM. Does it make use of 
shared memory
do you know?


Lawson



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