Folks - After long hesitation I've decided to subscribe to the Pharo list. I'm doing this mostly to put perspective on some issues that have come up here and where I feel I have a unique perspective on them. If you haven't guessed, I've been called many unfriendly names here, most recently "the FFI maintainer". Let's start there with putting some perspective on the issues. Fortunately, all of this discussion has been archived so we don't need to play "he said, she said" but I can just point you to the messages themselves. Lukas claims: "In fact we had that in Squeak 3.9 and early Pharo versions. I even wrote code that adapted this mechanism for FFI, but the FFI maintainer insisted on sticking with his compiler hacks." What Lukas *isn't* mentioning is that his proposal would have rendered all FFI code ever written nonfunctional and non-loadable. Practically speaking, it would have simplified two methods with fifty lines of code at the expense of making six years of work of many people unusable: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/106992.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107037.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107039.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107204.ht... Then of course, Stef threw in his usual good-natured self and changed what had been a relatively issue-focused discussion into an old-fashioned personal assault: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107124.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107134.ht... Despite that I proposed what I felt might be a workable alternative, which got shot down by Lukas in an instant: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107136.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107144.ht... A third proposal was made, that I agreed with as will, Lukas ignored the proposal completely: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107313.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107338.ht... At the end of the discussion, Lukas still hadn't responded to various compromises that I had offered to discuss with him: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107309.ht... http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-August/107337.ht... I've certainly had points in the past where some people here have every right to be mad at me and where I've made gross mistakes. But this wasn't one of those times. I've been fairly patient, took the discussion into whichever direction Lukas wanted, made alternative proposals, agreed with third party proposals, didn't even raise to the rhetoric bait that was thrown at me multiple times. The *one* tradeoff I wasn't willing to make for the sake of my users was to break their code; was to make their code non-loadable for absolutely no benefit for these users. Cleaning up two methods and fifty lines of code isn't worth breaking six years of work from lots of people. It wasn't then, it isn't today. And when Stef says "Some people may now understand why we finally decided to do Pharo." then you should probably wonder what that means in the context of this discussion. Finding solutions that benefit *all* parties involved isn't one of his primary strengths in my experience. Back to lurking for now, - Andreas