[Vm-dev] Cog: A question about: setInterruptCheckChain()

[Andreas Raab]

[Side note: Please don't quote entire posts if you're going to reply 
2/3rds of the way down. I had to scroll three times through this post to 
even find what you replied to]

On 9/29/2010 5:50 PM, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>> 1) The "mechanics" of writing a plugin, i.e., slang and compilation. This is
>> the part where the FFI would help, but so would better APIs for marshaling.
>> While it's "cool" that one can run slang plugins in Squeak it is also
>> completely and utterly *useless* when it comes to integrating platform
>> specific stuff and having to deal with Slang, VMMaker and the awful build
>> setups, and then -on top of that- the actual work you're trying to do is
>> just a bit too much.
>
> And i am here looking for a way to make it less painful.
> If one can make own stuff to work with OS via FFI,
> why he needs to go into slang , VMMaker, cmake, gcc jungles?

One word: Memory safety. Oh, that's two :-)

> Probably, when he consider that FFI is good, but have to use more
> safer solution,
> then he free to go and implement plugin or change VM, whatever.
> But for prototyping and fast implementation, FFI much better.

See, in my experience that claim is simply wrong. How can you say that 
(for example) a little test program like the one that I just wrote to 
experiment with a Windows function would be faster to write using the FFI?

------------------------------ CredTest.cpp ----------------------------

// CredTest.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application.
//

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <Windows.h>
#include <wincred.h>

LPTSTR readCredential(LPTSTR targetName) {
	CREDENTIAL *cred;

	if(CredRead(targetName, CRED_TYPE_GENERIC, 0, &cred)) {
		LPTSTR result = (LPTSTR) calloc(cred->CredentialBlobSize+1, 
sizeof(TCHAR));
		memcpy(result, cred->CredentialBlob, cred->CredentialBlobSize);
		return result;
	}
	printf("CredRead failed: %d\n", GetLastError());
	return NULL;
}

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
	LPTSTR credential = readCredential(L"TERMSRV/devmsapps01");
	printf("Credential: %s\n", credential);
	return 0;
}
----------------------------------------------------------------------

You can imagine that it took me some ten minutes or so (incl. firing up 
Visual Studio, creating a new project etc) to write this. Now do that in 
Squeak and keep in mind how much of your time you're wasting in the 
overhead of declaring the types, functions, defines. That's why I'm 
saying that unless you can get the equivalent of #include <windows.h> 
you're not even in the same ballpark.

> <sarcasm>
> Why Croquet using FFI for OpenGL binding, why not writing a plugin? It
> would be much more 'stable'
> and 'robust' and secure.
> </sarcasm>

Only one reason: The poor integration APIs. I couldn't figure out how to 
generate proper plugin glue (and later I had lost the source for 
generating this stufF). And we *paid* for it. Weeks and weeks of obscure 
crash reports that we couldn't figure out until *finally* we realized 
that when using client state operations a GC may occur if the rendering 
is interrupted "just so". We fixed this by (guess what) moving these 
operations into a plugin.

Cheers,
   - Andreas