[Vm-dev] VM handle management

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Wed Mar 24 14:31:39 UTC 2010


On 24.03.2010, at 13:40, David T. Lewis wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 08:10:18PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
>> 
>> Folks -
>> 
>> [Warning: Long post. Please try to stay on topic and don't get into any 
>> SmartSyntaxInterpreterPlugin / FFI syntax digressions that always come 
>> up with these issues. This is a practical proposal that I'd like to 
>> implement].
>> 
>> For the third time this month I ran into the situation that I was 
>> writing a plugin that would create an internal data structure 
>> (containing pointers etc) and where I wanted to return a handle to this 
>> structure and pass that back to the VM.
>> 
>> Since I'm a lazy bastard, what I usually do is something like this in 
>> the support code:
>> 
>> int sqNewFooBar(void) {
>>  /* creates a new foobar and returns a handle */
>>  FooBar *newFoo = malloc(1, sizeof(FooBar));
>> 
>>  /* return a handle, sort of */
>>  return (int) newFoo;
>> }
> 
> This seems like solving the wrong problem. If the problem is
> that pointers cannot be treated as sqInt or OOP values, then
> the solution is simple: Don't Do That. Declaring the types
> properly (in slang where necessary) results in simpler slang
> and simpler support code overall. That is my actual experience
> after working through quite a few 64/32 bit issues, not just
> a theoretical statement.

No, that's not the problem. The problem is having to implement a handle registry over and over again, for many plugins. Whenever a plugin needs to store some dynamic state, you end up writing this again. I've seen this with Cairo surfaces, Freetype fonts, DBus connections, OpenGL contexts etc. 

- Bert -




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