Native Windows VM extension

Andreas Raab Andreas.Raab at gmx.de
Fri Mar 22 09:57:59 UTC 2002


Göran,

> While on the subject - I posted some questions titled "State 
> of FFI and cousins?" (included below), if you have the time
> Andreas - could you perhaps answer them briefly?

Of course I don't have time but I can still answer them ;-)

> * FFI - Foreign Function Interface. A general mechanism for
> calling dynamic libraries.

Correct.

> * Plugins - Our current main mechanism for interfacing
> with libraries and also writing performance critival
> sections in Slang. Faster than FFI but also more coding
> required.

Correct.

> The Pythoneers (and others) have access to Swig (I think) etc.

Swig is (AFAIK) similar to both approaches. It generates the glue code
to call the appropriate function which may be either statically
(plugins) or dynamically (FFI) used.

> 1. Are we missing key pieces? How about callbacks?

No callbacks. WRT, to missing pieces it depends on what you actually
need. On Windows, having COM support would be very useful.

> 2. Is it easier/harder to "glue" an external library to
> Squeak than to (for example) Python?

"easier/harder" by what measures? I would say that it depends on how
familiar you are with the tools.

Cheers,
  - Andreas





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list