[Vm-dev] Stupidifying FFI/library loading mechanism

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Thu May 26 18:12:54 UTC 2011


On 26.05.2011, at 13:48, Igor Stasenko wrote:

> Hello,
> i am fed up seeing the messages like "FFI can't find a library" or "VM
> can't find my plugin".

I agree for FFI libraries. I do not agree for VM modules.

IMHO it is a terrible idea to lump the two together. They happen to share an implementation, but that is rather incidental.

Your new primitives should be added to the FFI. Heck, since it's FFI you should be able to just call whatever OS function you want to find out the right path. For FFI this okay because the code in the image needs to deal with highly platform-dependent stuff anyway.

VM modules (a.k.a. plugins) are a totally different kind of beast. They are just an implementation detail of the VM. Nothing in the image should need to care about where those plugins are. There are virtually no problems with built-in modules. There are very few and minor problems with external modules. And they are almost exclusive to Linux, where they have gotten much easier to fix since Ian made "squeakvm" be a shell script that sets the right paths and can easily be edited. I see no good reason to abandon this infrastructure.

- Bert -




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