FFI is weak (nearly useless??) on callbacks, where Alien appears to provide good support.  I agree the neither system is comlete w/o the ability to direct calls to an os thread to avoid blocking the entire vm.
 
Bill
 

From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Mariano Martinez Peck
Sent: Sunday, February 14, 2010 5:36 PM
To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr; johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Making FFI non-intrusive (Was: Re: Pharo changing the game)

Ok...if AlienFFI doesn't support multi-threaded, then, I think the same as Levente.

Why should I use AlienFFI instead of the normal FFI ? Which advantages does Alien have? Does someone know ?  (I ask just because of my ignorance)

Because for the moment it has two disadvantages, the ones Levente said: only mac, only x86.

Thanks

Mariano

2010/2/14 John M McIntosh <johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com>
Adding a multi-threaded FFI interface is always feasible. What I'd suggest is some get their corporate sponsor to pay for it as part of building the Alien FFI plugin for 
Unix and Windows. Then gift it back to the community, otherwise you'll see zero movement.  

On 2010-02-14, at 4:42 AM, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:

I have a simple question: Does someone know if AlienFFI still locks the complete VM while executing a function ?  I mean, it behaves exactly as normal FFI in that aspect ?   I would love a FFI that doesn't lock the VM. Or even better, let you choose, like VW FFI.

Cheers

Mariano

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 11:44 AM, St�phane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@inria.fr> wrote:
>
>> Yes Alien is the way to go.
>
> I wonder why you think that. Alien is
> - mac only (you may say it's not true, because one could build a unix or
>  windows vm that supports it, but that didn't happen in the past 1.5
>  years)
> - x86 only


I'm not knowledgeable enough but I refer here to some discussions I got with
eliot when we were at amsterdam. The comments I heard on the FFI implementation
were not that positive.

Now may be there is a road for FFI and Alien and it would be good to have the
extension lukas did in 3.9.

Stef


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