[Cuis-dev] Slang for Cuis (WIP, experimental)

[Philip Bernhart]

Hi Luciano,

Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> writes:

> This is great! Can this be used for writing named primitives (not FFI)
> plugins? It was super easy to do that in Squeak, and I miss it. I think we
> could do that without the VMMaker paraphernalia, just with an include file
> corresponding to the VM we’re using. If I remember correctly, that’s how it
> worked in Squeak.

in theory it could. The current state of the project is that I removed
the VM plugin generation machinery, because it was intertwined with
the VMMaker on one hand and on the other hand my current focus is to
target FFI based plugins as this seems to be the bigger usecase for
Slang. As named external plugin primitives were deemed by the SqueakVM
list subscribers mostly a bad idea, which should be removed from the
Opensmalltalk-VM I thought also that it wasn't worth the work to begin
with this.

There are a couple of implementation problems with external
named primitive plugins too, for example how do you keep the plugin
interface of the VM you are developing on in line with the generated
plugin, so the sq.h header file and all its dependencies? I also
don't want to put pressure on Juan Vuletich for say packaging always
the correct set of the opensmalltalk-vm headers with it or only
allow the functioning of Cuis Slang on systems which have a "proper"
installation with headers in place.

BUT I try to find a way if I can put back that functionality,
without the baggage.

I try to document my progress in the projects journal:
 https://github.com/Phantasus/Cuis-Smalltalk-Slang/blob/master/Journal.md


Thanks for your interest,
Philip