On 05.03.2010, at 20:27, Ricardo Moran wrote:
On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de wrote:
On 03.03.2010, at 00:42, Ricardo Moran wrote:
I might be missing something obvious here, but why is FFI forbidden in Etoys? Is it a matter of security?
Yes. One of the advantages of having a Virtual Machine is that you can be quite sure what the code running in it can and can not do. It has a pretty narrow interface to the "outer system". By allowing FFI that interface widens to all the libraries on the system, which means all bets are off.
Additionally, FFI calls are highly platform-specific, whereas Etoys projects are supposed to work on any platform.
Yes, those are very good reasons for excluding FFI from Etoys. If we write a plugin to handle the communication with the external libraries we use, would you reconsider including our work in Etoys? (now that I think of it, we will probably have some license issues... I will have to check that). Anyway, I think you can include the Arduino and SqueakNxt projects, they don't use FFI at all, only the SerialPlugin. Would that be ok? I must say, I would really love to see our projects included in Etoys!
I'd love to see more ways to connect Etoys with the real world. We integrated WorldStethoscope support already, and there is Joystick support, the camera works on some machines etc. We have the ScratchPlugin which would allow to connect to the ScratchBoard, and the Etoys code for this is sitting in a ticket already.
Now I can't promise to take your code in before having looked at it, and I'm not the only one deciding that, but we're certainly going to consider it :)
- Bert -