Communicating with other languages (or embedding squeak)

Daniel B. Faken faken at cascv.brown.edu
Fri Oct 8 14:23:23 UTC 2004


Hello all,

  I need to control external processes (on *nix, but possibly other 
platforms in the future).  I would like to do so by embedding an 
interpretable (i.e. not compiled) language into the external programs.
My squeak program needs to send & receive to/from them securely and with
decent efficiency -- e.g. via FIFOs.
  The ideal thing would be to embed squeak into them, extending it to have 
app-specific functions (open a new document, rotate a molecule, etc.).  
But from what I can gather from the mailing list and swiki, reentrancy is
not implemented in the FFI, and getting the footprint below (e.g.) 1MB is
problematic (an issue for me since many applications could potentially be
using the embedded squeak simultaneously - I don't want to add 13MB to 
each one).
  I've looked at languages like Io, TCL, Lua, etc. but haven't been happy
with any of them.. (though I have implemented primitive bridges for TCL 
and Io).

  So my real question is: has anyone worked on creating communication 
between squeak and some other small-footprint, interpreted, ffi-capable 
language?  Or, are there any such languages that are very similar to 
Squeak/smalltalk?
  (I saw some discussion of Smallscript/S#, but I need to develop for 
Linux, and I prefer open-source..)

  Thanks for any help!

cheers,
Daniel Faken





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