"Andreas Raab" <Andreas.Raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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 ;-)

Silly question from me. :-) Thanks!

[SNIPPED my correct stuff]
> > 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.

Ok. But if I am focusing on crossplatform stuff so I would most probably
aim for available crossplatform (well, at least Linux/Win32) dynamic
libraries and they wouldn't use COM so that's not a problem for me.

> > 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.

I was more thinking in terms of "missing pieces" - for example, not
having callbacks sounds like a biggie. Or perhaps it's not? And perhaps
Python has an edge in regard to how GC works etc. Well, as you see I
don't really know - that's why I am asking! :-)

I assume that there are examples in the available plugins how to
"emulate" callbacks using Semaphores etc. Hmmm, I guess I will just have
to dive in and see how it goes...

And... wasn't there an effort to make the Plugin stuff "smarter"? The
TestInterpreterPlugin sounds familiar. What happened with that and what
was it essentially?

End of questions. I promise. :-)

> Cheers,
>   - Andreas

Cheers, Göran