On Friday 07 September 2001 00:47, you wrote:
> The advantages, as I see it, for a SWIG for Squeak would be:
> * speed- apparently FFI isn't that fast, compared to pluggable prims

That's what I've heard too.

> * ease- my brief toying with FFI has been hit and miss.  There are really
> no docs, but when it clicks, it's not all that hard.  but all the same,
> SWIG would gen interface code for you, but with FFI, you still have to
> make definitions in some methods, and more likely further wrap them in
> Smalltalk.

FFI isn't cross platform either which makes for more work wrapping it. SWIG 
generated pluggable prims wrapper code should work on any platform the 
underlying library will work on.

> * security- apparently the FFI plugin is kind of a security risk, as it
> can load more or less any shared lib on a system.  With pluggable prims or
> SWIG extension code, only those explicity .so/modules can be used.

Of course, there's the problem that FFI isn't always available either.

-- 
Douglas