[squeak-dev] Usability of Squeak FFI for anything serious...

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Thu Apr 12 01:10:23 UTC 2018


Hi Nicolas,

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 2:23 PM, Nicolas Cellier <
nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to see how hard it is to port my HDF5 work from VW to Squeak.
> It was not a pleasure in VW, because that already raised some questions
> despite that there is a somehow detailed DLLCC manual:
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49544642/why-cant-i-
> pass-an-uninterpretedbytes-to-a-void-thru-dll-c-connect
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49564024/isnt-pointer-type-checking-
> disabled-in-dll-c-connect-and-is-that-ok
>

What are you actually trying to do?  Can you post the C definitions?  I'm
very familiar with both the SqueakFFI and DLLCC (as of 7.4.1) and the basic
differences are to do with DLLCC's better cross-platform support, in that
it auto-redefines typedefs on load.  But other than that I think the
SqueakFFI is either just as good, or in some cases better (e.g. DLLCC has a
bug in that it is the actual parameter that carries detailed type
information for a struct, whereas in Andreas' SqueakFFI it is, correctly,
the formal parameter).



>
>
> But in Squeak, it sounds like hard++:
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49782651/how-one-
> aligns-structure-fields-in-squeak-ffi
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49783126/how-one-
> defines-a-union-type-in-squeak-ffi
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49783443/how-one-
> defines-a-fixed-size-array-member-in-a-struct-in-squeak-ffi
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49783882/how-one-
> deals-with-typedefs-in-squeak-ffi
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49784253/how-one-
> deals-with-multiple-pointer-level-like-char-in-squeak-ffi
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49784522/how-one-
> supports-both-32-and-64-bits-target-in-squeak-ffi
>
> Either I'm blind, or the very light documentation that I found lacks those
> details
> http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2426
>
> I think that I could throw a few more questions (dealing with enums...)
> but I don't want to excede some unknown quota and start irritating a touchy
> SO moderator ;)
>
> I'm afraid that there is no answer but "you're on your own"...
> I'm open to studying Alien or UnifiedFFI of Pharo.
> Or I can try and improve FFI.
> At this stage, my trajectory has already been quite perturbed, and despite
> my knowledge of rocket science, I can see that I'm not going to put HDF5 on
> the intended orbit :(
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/attachments/20180411/6a938930/attachment.html>


More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list