[Vm-dev] building plugins outside the tree

[tim Rowledge]

> On 19-03-2018, at 4:46 AM, K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> Generating C code is the least of the problem. The complexity is in compiling it to a shared library. Hardware plugins face a much bigger issue than algorithmic plugins because they have to integrate slang generated code with hand-coded and local headers/libs.

You'll have the complexity of the build system whatever you do within a C/make world. You need the relevant headers and hand-written code and make related files. Nothing is likely to change that much.
You edit the hand-written code, generate any Slang code from your VMMaker image, go to the right directory and type make.

What could we do to make that easier? 

I guess *if* everything worked properly on all platforms (which it never has and likely never will) we could imagine each plugin directory containing links to every relevant file so that the insane complexity of paths that look like ../../../../../platforms/unix/sysV4/plugins/WibbleWriter could be avoided. That was actually a part of my original plan when I started the VMMaker stuff back in ... 2000. Eek. But linking simply didn't work across platforms back then and I don't honestly imagine it would work neatly now. Andreas insisted on a strange arrangement of files for Window because he didn't want to sort out nmake (which was the windows make equivalent back then and since I had had some very unpleasant experience making it work well enough to build VisualWorks a few years before that I couldn't really argue). RISC OS could do links but only really of directories. Mac couldn't do links at all, just sometihng I can't even remember the name of now, that had to be manually interpreted. Perhaps some git magic might make it work so that all the file appear in the plugin build directcory?

We could conceivably build a tool in Squeak to drive it all a bit more pleasantly, using stuff from OSProcess and CommandTool etc. Platform spread, as so often, is a major cause of work here.

We could certainly improve documentation so it is easier to find out what is needed. 

I'd even argue that we would be better off *not* having copies of the generated code publicly available and looking like you can edit them. Generating the files from Slang is not really all that time consuming (even on a Pi) and you don't have to do all of it every time, and we could probably improve detection of when you do.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Fac me cocleario vomere! = Gag me with a spoon!