Hi Michał,

> On Jul 10, 2022, at 6:39 AM, Michał Olszewski <m.olszewski at nexat.pl> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> How safe are asynchronous FFI callbacks that could possibly be called from another thread?

Not at all safe.  They would almost certainly result in a vm level crash.

> For example, a library that may perform such call to notify about an AIO that has just been completed.
> 
> If not, how to ensure it?

There are two ways. One is to contribute to the development of the multi-threaded vm/threaded FFI; see CoInterpreterMT, CogThreadManager et al in VMMaker.oscog.

The other is to use the signalSemaphoreWithIndex api (paired with the image-level newExternalSemaphore method), which allows safe asynchronous signaling of a Smalltalk semaphore.  One then arranges that a high-enough priority Smalltalk process looping waiting on the semaphore invokes some C (or plugin code) synchronously once past the wait that fetches the callback data and evaluates the callback synchronously in the main vm thread.

> Michał


Eliot
_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)