[Vm-dev] [Vm-beginners] Stability of the external plugin interface

[Robert]

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 12:46, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

> OK, I'll try to answer some of the thoughts on this -
>
>> On 2020-05-24, at 11:07 PM, Robert <robert.withers at pm.me> wrote:
>>
>> How about the CryptographyPlugins? What would switching to FFI look like? I feel like we still need custom C code implementing the algorithms.
>>
>> Is it that we would have shared object libraries (.so/DLLs), generated from slang, but not creating plugins, just generating .so libs and the FFI calls to use them?
>
> Right now (assuming I'm remembering it all correctly and with the proviso that I haven't written a new plugin in several years) an external plugin is compiled from the assorted code required (some plugins are solely slang generated code, some are solely hand-written C, some are slang + C + calls to other libraries and so on) and a platform specific form of shared library is made. Are they in a form that is callable via 'normal' ffi calls? Dunno, but clearly they *could* be made that way with not very much change.

Tim, does this mean that the plugin generation and linking as appropriate continues a pace, while the in-image named prims table switches all entries to FFI calls? CryptographyPlugins have the advantage of slang generated only code.

Would it be possible to take advantage of a GPU??

K, r
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