Hm, not exactly. I have examined ByteArray a bit and found out, that FFI 
extends it with some methods
to support ExternalStructure and co. This is nice, but the problem is, 
that it is not XDR compatible, meaning
(and correct me if I'm wrong), it will not work across machines with 
different architectures (e.g. Cray, VAX, etc.).
The problem is mainly, that ByteArray methods do not align the saved 
data to 4 bytes and not every method
supports little/big endian encoding. Also the methods that have no 
endian flag are using a primitive call to the FFI
plugin, those having the flag are making the conversion in-method, which 
is not very good I think, having the same
implementation both in plugin and in image. An ideal solution would be 
to support XDR en/decoding in the FFI plugin
by calling the xdr_* methods from <rpc/xdr.h>, but I don't know how 
difficult it would be to modify the FFI plugin
sources.

Cheers,

Elod

Jason Johnson wrote:
> This is what the FFI package does, no?
>
> On 8/24/07, Elod Kironsky <kironsky at grisoft.cz> wrote:
>   
>> Hi!
>>
>> I wonder if there is any package in Squeak that would en/de-code
>> standard C types to a byte-array, as the RFC 1014 - XDR: eXtrenal Data
>> Representation standard does. I'm currently working on a client program
>> to Player/Stage and it would save me a lot of work, as the communication
>> is done via TCP packages. I know ByteArray can do byte, short, long and
>> even double, but is it XDR compatible? Also, is there an equivalent of
>> the C function gettimeofday(), that would return me a double, or
>> something, that I can put into a ByteArray with doubleAt:put:bigEndian:?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Elod
>>
>>
>>     
>
>
>