Pharo can already communicate natively with objective C and all its libraries via Nativeboost. An example is Mars on Pharo.

http://marsonpharo.wordpress.com/

Nativeboost of course can communicate with C and it even offers an inline Assembler so you can go down to bare metal having all the speed and performance you want.
Nativeboost cannot communicate with C++ currently , so it cant use C++ libraries like VTK , however there is a workaround.

It is possible to wrap a C++ to a C DLL (or the equivelant of other OS) , thus indirectly Nativeboost can use even C++ libraries. Here is how ->�http://stackoverflow.com/questions/199418/using-c-library-in-c-code

Overall when dealing with C/C++ you have to deal with all sort of technically issues that you don't have in pharo. The problem also becomes even worse because C/C++ libraries usually are not made with simplicity in mind. In the case for example of CAD software with pharo this is of course doable but you will need to have a very deep understanding how 3d graphics works which is a highly technically area by itself. So as you can see there are loads of technically problems to overcome even before worrying about Pharo.

But none the less its doable. ��


On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 5:24 AM, askoh <askoh@askoh.com> wrote:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dc552/papers/SmalltalkInACWorld.pdf

The paper talks about Smalltalk and Objective C coexisting equally in a
software development environment. And by virtual of ObjC compatibility with
C/C++, the whole C world is open to Smalltalk. Isn't this very exciting?
Anyone else noticing this? Can Pragmatic Smalltalk be used to develop a CAD
system using the OpenCascade and Visualization Toolkit (VTK) open source
libraries?

Can this work help us enter the Apple ecosystem?

All the best,
Aik-Siong Koh



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