"Raab, Andreas" <Andreas.Raab at disney.com> wrote:

> > But let's just say for the sake of argument that Andreas were
> > to be developing a native 3D acceleration kit for Squeak, 
> > using FFI. 
> 
> Eeeek! No way! If anything you want to have an abstraction layer on top of
> this to provide a unified view on all of the underlying specifics, such as
> different APIs (OpenGL, Direct3D, RAVE come to mind) as well as API specific
> differences (now is that OpenGL 1.1 or OpenGL 1.0 with a vertex array
> extension or is it plain 1.0 or what).
> 

Yes!  This is an example of where "just remove I/O" wouldn't work, but
"oops-as-capabilities" would.  You don't give people access to the raw
FFI primitives, but it's perfectly fine to give them a 3D abstraction
which happens to use FFI in its implementation.


Lex