2008/11/15 Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr>:
Is somebody working on Alien for Pharo? I've been meaning to ask about how Pharo will handle the non-MIT (Apache) license of Alien. Do we have a list of friendly/compatible licenses?
It's Apache licensed.
Mind i ask, why do we need alien Alien FFI library, especially which comes with non-MIT license? Is there something wrong with current FFI implementation, and is there any comparison to tell which one is better and why?
I'm not good enough about the details but eliot was not talking about the current with more than "prototype" implementation
The most heavyweight part of any foreign function interface is coercion of values. I don't think that Alien knows anything about squeak's object memory model and its objects - so you have to write own. The rest part of FFI - how an actual call made is quite unimportant.
send an email to eliot directly. Gilad was not either describing the squeak one with nice terms :)
Ah, i thought you talking about different implementation. I hear about Eliot's plans to make a better FFI, but didn't heard that its having a name - Alien.
I had to touch an FFI plugin for Hydra, and changed few instructions, which made it run faster than original FFI on regular squeak VM. It can be optimized even further to use stack-allocated buffer for pushing arguments, to populate values directly on stack instead of collecting them into buffer and then pushing on stack, like currently done. But there's not much can be done with coercing stuff - you can't avoid converting values back and forth, this what makes FFI slow.
Marcus
-- Marcus Denker -- denker@iam.unibe.ch http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker
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