I can't speak to that, but the callouts of Alien have been at best damned by faint praise; FFI's weakness in callbacks is clear, so an enhancement of FFI with Alien's acknowledged strengths seems like a natural approach. Hopefully the handling of structure fields will improve at the same time. ________________________________________ From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Joachim Geidel [joachim.geidel@onlinehome.de] Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2010 1:46 PM To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Alien + Cog VM Hi Eliot, Am 26.12.10 19:11 schrieb Eliot Miranda:
What exactly does "Alien callouts will die" mean? Does it mean that the Alien class library is deprecated and will be replaced by a new version of FFI? Or is it something else?
It means what it says; that the callout primitives in Alien will die and all the rest will remain. FFI callouts will accept Aliens and, because they have type information, render the Alien call-outs redundant and problematic. The Alien data representation and callback facilities will be retained.
Thanks for the clarification! This sounds as if upgrading a class library from the current version of Alien to the new one won't be much work. Joachim Geidel