[Cuis-dev] Alien? ThreadedFFIPlugin?

[Philip Bernhart]

Hi,

I recently asked on the squeak vm-beginners list about the stability
of the external plugin interface. The general vibe from Eliot was:
  don't! Use FFI instead!

See:
  http://forum.world.st/Stability-of-the-external-plugin-interface-td5117112.html

In particular I got a response to an answer / comment:

> I'm looking forward to it, but in the meantime I need to write packages
> for Cuis Smalltalk which I need which in turn go over the slow legacy
> Squeak FFI with no callbacks. Is there a roadmap, some public plan of
> these implementations? I think that ideas are already around a long time
> already and it seems that the VM development is heavily underfunded or
> else it would already be here.

Eliot mirandas response:
> I don’t understand where you get the idea that Cuis has no callbacks.
> Cuis supports Alien and has access to the ThreadedFFIPlugin and runs on
> Cog, so it can have callbacks easily.  I suspect they’re there if you
> load FFI and Alien.  Ask on the Cuis list.
>
> In a Squeak image look at Alien’s class side exampleQsort which uses a
> callback to implement the sort function to qsort.  I bet this works on
> Cuis too.

So I think I never saw any Alien or ThreadedFFI in the
Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev directories, I grepped for it. From the FFI I always
thought that this is the old Squeak FFI implementation, am I wrong?

I kind of feel like someone who lived in the geocentric worldview
and was now told that the earth and other planets go around the sun.


Thanks,
Philip