[Vm-dev] Merging FFI and Alien

[Esteban Lorenzano]

> On 25 Jan 2016, at 12:00, Nicolai Hess <nicolaihess at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 2016-01-24 12:57 GMT+01:00 Esteban Lorenzano <estebanlm at gmail.com <mailto:estebanlm at gmail.com>>:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Recently I’ve been talking with Eliot and we came to the conclusion that FFI and Alien repositories needs to be merged.
> Our rational is that 1) both are different ways of doing the same (often with same primitives) and much more important 2) Alien contains the the “de facto” callback mechanism supported by the VM.
> Keeping them separated and treated as two different things is negative and an important source of confusion for people willing to do FFI this days.
> So, here is my proposal (already talked with Eliot).
> 
> 1) unify http://source.squeak.org/FFI <http://source.squeak.org/FFI> and http://www.squeaksource.com/Alien <http://www.squeaksource.com/Alien> into http://source.squeak.org/FFI <http://source.squeak.org/FFI>
> That means copying into FFI repo all Alien history.
> 
> 2) Rename Alien package into FFI-Alien (extract the Alien-Win32 category into its own package)
> 
> 3) Create a ConfigurationOfFFI who takes properly FFI and FFI-Alien, etc.
> 
> That means also deprecate Alien project in squeaksource (which usually is just put a WARNING text in home page :P)
> 
> So… if nobody has a anything against this plan, I will do it next week :)
> 
> Are there differences between pharos ffi-package (FFI-Kernel) and squeak?
> For example, the fallback implementation in 
> ExternalFunction>>#tryInvokeWithArguments:
> referese to ContextPart, but it should be Context in (for Pharo only).

that’s not related with my question ;)
it does not influences at all the renaming, but yep… I’m aware about that difference… I will add some compatibility stuff eventually, but I’m not pressed for now since #tryInvokeWithArguments: is not used at all (probably we should remove it anyway)

cheers,
Esteban

> 
> 
>  
> 
> cheers!
> Esteban

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/attachments/20160125/734bd374/attachment.htm