[Vm-dev] rearchitecting the FFI implementation for reentrancy

[David T. Lewis]

On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 05:56:02PM -0700, Eliot Miranda wrote:
>  
> Hi All,
>     I'm looking at making the Squeak FFI reentrant to support nested calls
> and possibly threading.  The current FFI has a couple of issues which render
> it non-reentrant.

Your approach sounds fairly straightforward. Slightly off of your intended
topic, but I want to mention also that we have some changes queued up for
FFI to address 64 bit pointer issues. The changes are fairly extensive, so
I'd like to lobby for getting these done before too much bit rot sets in.

For a description of the status of the 64-bit FFI updates:
  http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2008-April/001900.html

Patches on Mantis:
  http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7237

Eliot, I don't know what your time frame is for doing the reentrant FFI work,
but if we could do the 64-bit updates first that would be a very good thing
from my point of view.

Is there any interest in taking this on right now? The affected folks are
Andreas, Ian, and John. Opinions?

Dave