[squeak-dev] Usability of Squeak FFI for anything serious...

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Fri Apr 13 19:28:07 UTC 2018


On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Nicolas Cellier <
nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 2018-04-13 17:08 GMT+02:00 Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>:
>
>> Hi Nicolas,
>>
>>
>> On Apr 13, 2018, at 7:01 AM, Nicolas Cellier <
>> nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> So I started to improve the Squeak FFI:
>> -1) I corrected pointer arithmetic on 64 bits
>> http://source.squeak.org/FFI/FFI-Kernel-nice.48.diff
>> -2) I prepared the possibility of having automated layout spec updates
>> http://source.squeak.org/FFI/FFI-Kernel-nice.49.diff
>>
>> Note that the FFI plugin by itself did not change.
>> The next steps should be to provide support for native platform alignment
>> of fields and unions.
>> I'll focus on these when i can.
>>
>>
>> I shall join you as soon as I am able.  Right now I have a pressing task,
>> but within a few weeks I should be able to help.
>>
>>
> Hi Eliot,
> thanks.
> I think that I can manage the easiest image side issues, but as soon as a
> feature will require an evolution of the plugin, your review is mandatory,
> as well as coordination with Pharo team, Backward compatibility counts and
> Esteban spent enough time on UFFI, so this will mean either unifying our
> forces or forking a plugin!
>

Sounds good.  A fork is to be avoided at all costs.  I don't see any
pressure for a fork though because the plugin is essentially defined by the
platform's ABI and Andreas' design for the type specification language is
sufficiently general.  Am I missing something?  (Esteban are you reading?)

2018-04-12 23:27 GMT+02:00 Denis Kudriashov <dionisiydk at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> There is project TalkFFI <https://github.com/estebanlm/TalkFFI> from
>>> Ciprian Teodorov.
>>>
>>> 2018-04-12 22:50 GMT+02:00 Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>:
>>>
>>>> On 12 April 2018 at 22:34, Nicolas Cellier <
>>>> nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> There are at least two problems:
>>>>> - documentation (lack of)
>>>>> - limitations (unions, pointer on pointer on ...)
>>>>> - automation (I said at least two, not at most)
>>>>>
>>>>> For the first problem, I opened the SO issues. Not ideal, but it's a
>>>>> start.
>>>>> For the second, I'll see if I can do something...
>>>>> For the third, I did import some .h header with VW DLLCC, and I'm in
>>>>> the process of translating to other dialects.
>>>>> It's easier because Smalltalk syntax is order of magnitudes smaller
>>>>> than C syntax.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ​I always thought it should be fairly straightforward to make a FFI
>>>> bindings generator using SWIG (http://www.swig.org/).
>>>>
>>>> SWIG parses C headers and outputs XML. Starting from that XML should be
>>>> way easier than trying to parse C ourselves.
>>>>
>>>> ​- Bert -​
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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-- 
_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot
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