Its the usual case of not being able to have your cake and eat it too.

If you want top performance you have to manage memory yourself plus the abilitiy to access thousands of C libraries is not such a bad excuse for a compromise. The FFI is not a problem is a solution to many problems and people using it its not as if Smalltalk offers them any alternative choice.��

Not to forget that Slang itself relies heavily on C, which is only the core of the VM and the very core of the implementation.��

Understanding how to work with pointers in C is pretty much understanding how to works with Objects in Smalltalk. Both are nuclear weapons that those two languages are build around. If ones does not understand their usage he will shoot his foot in the end.��

The important thing to remember is that C's goal is not the same as of Smalltalk. Its not there to hold your hand and make coding easy for you. C is there to offer low level access combined with top performance. It may have started as a general purpose language decades ago when coding in Assembly was still a pleasant experience. Nowdays C has completely replaced Assembly as the top performance language for low level coding.��

C may appear as a problematic language to a Smalltalker but only because he sees it from the Smalltalk point of view. The harsh reality of the world is that as much as one may want to shoehorn it , not everything can be elegantly mapped to a object. Smalltalk may be OO to the bone , but the world we live in, cannot afford such simple structures to accomodate of varied immense complexity.

On the subject of pointers, the general rule of thumb is to keep things as simple as possible and avoide trying to do weird "magic" with them. There is a ton of things that C does under the hood to generate highly optimised machine code that can fry the brain , as the usual case with low level coding,�� so keeping it simple is the way to go.��

Oh and dont try to shoehorn the Live coding enviroment in debugging C code, as much as one may want to brag of Smalltalk's elegant debugger, C development tools are light years ahead in dealing with C problems.��

May advice to people is that if you do it via FFI first, you do it wrong.

Do it always first with C with a powerful C IDE like Visual Studio, make sure your code works there and then use the UFFI. Will make life thousand times easier. I learned that the hard way when I was playing around with Pharo and shared memory.��

So yes having a FFI that does not help you avoid coding in C first, is a big plus, not a minus. Sometimes it makes sense to live outside the image, this is an excellent case to prove why that is a great idea. .����

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 11:10 AM Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Ben,

It's a super bad idea to copy an ExternalAddress.

It's common knowledge in C++ copy operator & copy constructors...

But it's not obvious to me that you'll have double freeing (unless you explicitely free the pointer by yourself).

If you use gcallocate: then only the original is registered for magical auto-deallocation at garbage collection...

What you will have is more somthing like dangling pointer: continue to use pointer xa2->a1 when a1 was already freed.

FFI is great, it introduces the problem of C in Smalltalk, augmented with the problems of wrapping C in Smalltalk.

2017-11-06 4:23 GMT+01:00 Ben Coman <btc@openinworld.com>:

My current employment work hours and roster have severely curtailed the time I have hacking Pharo, so I've not dug enough to be sure of my observations a few months ago, and this is from memory, but I was starting to develop a suspicion about the uniqueness of ExternalAddress(s).

A while ago, in order to fix some stability issues on Windows, a guard was added somewhere that slowed down some operations.�� Looking into this and experimenting with removing the guard I seem to remember VM crashes due to a double-free() of an address, due to there being two ExternalAddresses holding the same external address.����

My intuition is that that somewhere an ExternalAddress(a1) pointing at a particular external resource address "xa1" was being copied, so we end up with ExternalAddress(a2) also pointing at "xa1", with��and object b1 holding a1 and object b2 holding a2.�� During finalization of b1, ExternalAddress a1 free()d xa1, and a1 was flagged to avoid double-free()ing.�� But that didn't help when b2 was finalized, since a2 had no indication that xa1 had been free()d.��

That is...

b1-->a1-->xa1

b2 := b1 copy.

b2-->a2-->xa1

b1 finalize a1 --> free(xa1)

b2 finalize a2 --> free(xa1) --> General Protection Fault

It was hard to follow this through and I didn't succeed in tracking down where such a copy might have been made, but the idea simmering in my mind since then is to propose that...��

�� �� ExternalAddresses be unique in the image and behave like Symbols,��

�� �� such that trying to copy one returns the identical object.����

The idea being that when b2 is finalized, a1 would notice that xa1 had already been free()d and raise a Smalltalk exception rather than a general protection fault.

b1-->a1-->xa1

b2 := b1 copy.
b2-->a1-->xa1

�� �� �� �� ��^^

b1 finalize a1 --> free(xa1)

b2 finalize a1 --> Smalltalk exception

I write now in response to Stef since I vaguely remember it being Freetype related.�� But I also remember the issue being FFI related and Freetype is a plugin not FFI.�� So I'm not sure my memory is clear and perhaps I have the "wrong end of the stick" but anyway, rather than hold back longer because of that, perhaps this can stimulate some discussion and at least I learn something to clarify my understanding here.

cheers -ben��

On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 4:48 PM, Stephane Ducasse <stepharo.self@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> I'm and I guess many of you are fedup about the instability that the
> FreeType plugin��produces.
>
> So we need help because clement and esteban are fully booked.
>
> We have three options:
>
> - drop Freetype alltogether
> - rewrite the plugin
> - create a binding using raffaillac sketch
>
> Now we need help. Who is willing to help us?
> Should we try to set up a bounty?
>
> Stef