Hi, i wanted to give my opinion on this, since i've encountered some of the problems you mention.

Sometimes to benefit from the simplicity of Smalltalk while coexisting with other tools, we must cope with low level technology "glue code".

NB made it easy to do so, compared to Alien,FFI, writing plugins in C. When i first started with Squeak and the Pharo1.0, it was a real pain interfacing with external libraries, THANKS �Igor!�

Still someones needs to do it, hence why a lot of people of this�community�spent loads of time coding this "extra work" to be able to do their "real work".

I�wouldn't�say that you need to be�extremely�bright to built a wrapper library using NB, once you know what api you want to call, and the type of arguments.

There's plenty of examples out there, and Igor always responds with tough questions!

Give a try! maybe its easier than you think.

Fernando

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 12:35 PM, drush66 <davorin.rusevljan@gmail.com> wrote:
Igor Stasenko wrote
> AFAIK, COM is fairly simple. You need to do a lill parsing deciphering
> IDL interface,
> and frankly i don't remember all the details. But at the end, it is
> just a bunch of C calls.
> With NativeBoost you can do calls to C .. so it is doable.
>
> Again, Dolphin Smalltalk can use COM , so if it can be done there, i
> don't see why it is impossible
> to do the same in Pharo.

well, Dolphin COM interface was written by two very bright chaps with
intimate knowledge of their VM and system, good knowledge of windows and
COM, over a rather long period.

So I would say:

- Doable: absolutely yes,

- Feasible for someone who does not have solid experience in FFI and just
needs to connect to this library so that he can do his real job: probably
no.





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