[Pharo-project] [Vm-dev] Re: Can OSProcess functionality be implemented using FFI instead of plugin?

[Levente Uzonyi]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2016, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:

(Again no quote.)

My question was obviously unrelated to the plugin with the constants.
I was just wondering if there's a reason to use FFI instead of OSProcess.
Based on your answers, I assume that
- Your solution is Unix/Mac only, since dup and dup2 don't work on 
Windows. At least they didn't work when I wrote the ProcessWrapper plugin.
- You have the drawbacks of non-blocking streams: polling, repeated write 
attempts.
- You have to solve the problem of different platforms (constant values, 
library names and paths, etc), something that OSProcess handles by 
default.

All this makes me wonder:
- Why do you want this FFI-based solution at all? 
- How will it be better than OSProcess?
- If you decide to make a plugin as well to tackle some of the problems, 
why make it a mixed solution instead of plugin-only?

Levente