"John W. Sarkela" wrote:
> 
> We have a working callback mechanism based on POSIX-compliant
> semaphores that we are preparing for release.  It is fully
> synchronous now, but we are planning on support for asynchronous
> call-in (to Squeak) as well.

Interesting!

> 
> We are preparing a VM plug-in that provides this mechanism through a .so on
> Unixesque systems.

That's great!

> It is easy to see how Mac and Windows-32 ports may be
> made.  There is a little bit of portable C-code to operate the platform
> semaphore mechanisms.  The rest is in Smalltalk 'Slang' and regular
> Smalltalk.  We have tested an implementation that used additional
> primitives in the VM.  We are reimplementing these as a
> named-primitive plugin.

That's nice. It's good to have as many named pluggable prims as
possible:
- more readable,
- less changes at the core VM,
- pluggable.

> 
> We are planning to make this available by the time of Camp Smalltalk, but
> may be able to post something sooner.
> 
> We have posted this notice because we are seeing a good number of calls for
> this capability.  We can serve as the center for this effort if the
> community is receptive. 

> We would like to advance this in the context of a
> generalized message capability.

Sounds very fundamental: perhaps this should be synchronized with SqC...


Thank you for your efforts!


Greetings,

Stephan