Hello,

I have had a casual interest in squeak for a while, but just started
doing more serious development in it recently (lots of fun!).  I am
trying to bridge some functionality from the gnu scientific library
(GSL) so I can do numerical stuff in squeak.

I have successfully bridged the main functionality I need, but after
some research am still a bit confused on the proper way to deal with
memory allocated outside the VM:

1. I have ExternalStructure subclasses, e.g. GSLMatrix, that
correspond to C structures in the GSL library.  (see
http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Matrices.html#Matrices
for the structure definition.)

2. I allocate these structures using FFI with the GSL library, e.g. via

gsl_matrix * gsl_matrix_alloc (size_t n1, size_t n2)

3. I can deallocate the external memory with an FFI call:

void gsl_matrix_free (gsl_matrix * m)

My questions is WHEN/WHERE I should make this call to make sure
external memory is cleaned up properly.  In the FFI examples and
searching the website, I have seen this done in instance methods
"free", "dispose", "destroy", as well as the "post-mortem"
finalization described here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/664.

Can anyone describe or point me to the "best practice" I should use?

Similarly, I assume that if I created instances that point to external
structures (e.g. created instances in my Workspace), and shutdown
squeak, when I restart the VM, I have some instances with handles that
point to invalid external addresses.  I am OK to just avoid using
these objects, but will the fact that they still have these handles
cause problems (e.g. when garbage collection occurs)?  If so, what is
the best practice here - to reconstitute the external portion of the
objects when the image is loaded?

Thanks for any help, apologies if this is more appropriate for the
beginners list.

cheers,

Jim M