(this probably won’t get to the pharo list unless someone forwards it)

On 15-09-2014, at 12:40 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Craig Latta <craig at netjam.org> wrote:
>      Hoooold on there... :)  Does this mean that Vassili tried Ffenestri
> and found it unusable? If so, why? Details, please.
> 
> I don't want to talk for Vassili, but he had done the prototype for Pollock, the new window system for VW that was squandered by Cincom management.  In this he architected full conversion between native and non-native windows, both dynamically and over snapshot.  So when he came to implement the GUI for Newspeak he used that experience.  I don't see the same architectural support in  Graphics-External-Ffenestri it doesn't even support snapshot and resume on the same window system.  

Absolutley. Ffenestri is/was just the basic low-level support that allowed host windows (and menus on windows/mac) to be used. John & I did it as part of the early work for Sophie and so far as I recall it never got actually used. Since people had been whining (loudly, frequently, and annoyingly) about how desperately host windows were needed we released the code with working trivial demos and … nothing. I don't think anybody ever even reported trying it out. This was around ten years ago, so evidently it was a really really urgent thing.

If there is actually functional code that can be adopted into Squeak we should go with it. 

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: CPM: Change Programmer's Mind