[Vm-dev] [Vm-beginners] Stability of the external plugin interface

[K K Subbu]

On 26/05/20 2:20 am, tim Rowledge wrote:
>> But this was at process level. If only I could do the same with
>> DLLs. If only Squeak had a tool (ELF reader?) to reify a DLL,
>> extract its instruction set, interface definitions, state variables
>> and calling conventions. Then I can livecode a class and
>> dynamically compile it (now that we have JIT) to call functions DLL
>> without leaving the image. The code may not be 'portable' in
>> traditional sense. But it will be a lot more manageable than static
>> designs.
> 
> VW has a parser of C header files that is I suppose the right way to
> do this sort of thing - you parse the headers (warning - I seem to
> recall parsing 'windows.h' taking several days in the original VW ddl
> product) and build proxies of all the types/structs/etc.  Is that a
> practical way to do it? Hell of a lot of work to do, certainly.

We don't know what source code was used to compile the DLL. Having an 
inspector for DLLs would be a good start. If we pull out the dynamic 
link maps into the image, then we can simulate in the image, what VM 
currently does through dlopen() calls. Like what we do in doPrimitive.

Regards .. Subbu