it is correct that alien touches the parser?
The declarations are not pragmas compliant.

Yes -- there's a hack in there that allows an error code variable to be passed in the <primitive> pragma where otherwise the parser would expect a literal.

* AlienLibrary shouldn't do its cleanup at shutdown, it should do it at image startup instead. That way a simple image save won't invalidate all of my external references.

* I'm creating a partial Alien library for GemStone so that I can use the CairoGraphics package in both Pharo and GLASS. But on x86-64, there there's a size difference between a pointer/long and an integer. It'd be nice to have some more explicit APIs on Alien, so I could say "Alien newCInteger" or "Alien newCLong" and have the platform return me the proper size Alien. Even without the platform size differences, it seems awkward to use "Alien newC: 4" everywhere I want an integer, "Alien newC: 8" where I want a double, etc.

* Similarly, I'd like an API on AlienLibrary that distinguishes between integers and longs. In the CairoGraphics package I've added some methods to this effect:

or

I like the way it reads. And even though on IA32 they both use the same 4-byte primitive, on x86-64 I could have pointers return an 8-byte Alien and ints return a 4-byte primitive.

* Same story with the basic data accessors like (un)signedLongAt: -- I'd want to add something like (un)signedIntAt et. al.

Yes, I realize that some of this is overkill for IA32 only, but on the other hand I think a couple of these intention-revealing changes would make Alien client code prettier.

Sorry to be so wordy. I'd be glad to do all of the Smalltalk-level coding on this -- much of it is done already in my image -- but I thought I'd better ask the maintainer(s) first and this list is the best forum I've found for Alien issues.