I think that Alien vs. FFI has more to do with historic reasons than anything else. If I'm right, the original FFI implementation had some problems, like not being reentrant, and therefore not supporting callbacks among other things (someone correct me if wrong). Alien came to solve some of these limitations, but hen FFI was improved and made reentrant, and now both implementations do more or less the same. NativeBoost on the other hand is more like a model of machine instructions, so that you can assemble them. One particular use is to implement the C calling convention, getting a 100% smalltalk FFI.

Eliot and Igor will probably be able enlighten us better.

Regards,
�� �� �� �� �� �� Javier.

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 12:23 AM, Dave Mason <dmason@mason-rose.ca> wrote:

On 2011-Jun-9, at 17:47 , Chris Cunnington wrote:

Do you mean Alien?

Yes Alien....damned thumb keyboards....

Alien is newer and was written to address some shortcomings in FFI.

What shortcomings?

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6100
http://www.squeaksource.com/Alien/
http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2010-March/023328.html
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-April/148455.html

I followed those threads, but they don't really say why. ��NativeBoost is faster than FFI, but NB is a whole other ball-of-wax, and I'd like to support it eventually as well as FFI/Alien.

Thanks ��../Dave




--
Javier Pim��s
Ciudad de Buenos Aires