On Mar 6, 2010, at 6:41 AM, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

> On 03/06/2010 02:22 PM, Lawson English wrote:
>> Does the CObject FFI allow you to do what F_script does and examine the
>> entire object tree written in Cocoa? That would at least for Macs, give
>> you a full blown GUI external to the Squeak desktop.

We've done this using aliens in Newspeak (see ObjectiveCAline and friends). To do a real GUI is more involved, because of MacOS threading issues (which thread is in control etc.). We hope to fix this in time, and of course provide a fully native binding for the Brazil/Hopscotch GUI on macs, as we do on Windows.

> 
> You _can_ write an Objective-C binding using CObject (as in, it's been done).  The painful part is converting NSArray <-> Array and NSString <-> String.
> 
> However, nice-looking bindings will always have a part written in C that will be VM-dependent, which is why I put this project last.  It is much less useful than it looks.


Inteoperating smoothly with the rest of the world is very useful. 

Cheers, Gilad