[Vm-beginners] A couple of vm beginner questions

[Philip Bernhart]

Hi Eliot,

Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> writes:
> 3. What is now the supposed "best practice" of adding functionality
>>    to squeak? Say I want to add to it support for password hashing
>>    using libsodium and the library blocks the VM when trying
>>    to do more elaborate calls, so an async call would be much less
>>    of a pain from the user perspective. So async calling in a
>>    FFI library of that code or moving that into a VM plugin so
>>    it's much wider supported?
>>
>
> Ah.  Now that is a long topic.  How much time do you have before you
> urgently need a solution?  The right way is to use the ThreadedFFI but this
> is still in prototype form.  It is something I will put energy into this
> year but the solution won't be ready for months, and that's being
> optimistic.  And we really need to gather a team together around the
> threaded FFI to share the effort and maintain energy and focus.
>
> A "quick hack" is exemplified by the style used in the Windows SocketPlugin
> support; see platforms/win32/plugins/SocketPlugin/sqWin32NewNet.c.  The
> support code manages a set of hidden threads to do lookups and there is a
> pair pf primitives, one to submit a non-blocking lookup request, and
> another to reap the request.  See e.g.
>
> NetNameResolver class>>#primStartLookupOfName:
> NetNameResolver class>>#primAddressLookupResult
> NetNameResolver class>>#primAbortLookup

That's what I implemented doing threads on the C end.
But I'm still waiting for ThreadedFFI. What is the current status?
Some mouthwatering insights? Or the answert to the all encompassing
question of "is it worth it?".


Cheers,
Philip