Sounds interesting. Thanks for the notice. cheers -ben On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Göran Krampe <goran@krampe.se> wrote:
(resend) Hi fellow Smalltalkers!
At 3DICC we are using Nim (http://nim-lang.org) to write our performance critical code that typically otherwise would have been written in C/C++. But now we have Nim :)
Nim can generate dlls/so libraries following C conventions so they can easily be called via FFI.
Andreas Rumpf (author of Nim who works with us) wrote a small utility called SqueakNim - its a set of Nim macros that generates the .st primitive calls based on the Nim code, so it takes out some grunt work and matches up types as far as it can. Simple, but very nice.
The docs etc are a bit unpolished, but the trivial example in "tests" has comments in it and it works in Squeak 5, Pharo 3, Pharo 4 and I guess in most versions of Squeak/Pharo.
Why would you be interested?
- Nim is great fun! C/C++ is torture. Same performance, nuff said. - Nim has a tool called c2nim that wraps C *and* C++ libraries.
That last part is a killer. We use c2nim to wrap Urho3D - a huge C++ game engine, works great, and that wrapper is also open source btw, Urhonimo.
How do I use it? See README at:
https://gitlab.3dicc.com/3dicc/squeaknim
For some more information my article (predating this tool) might have some details:
http://goran.krampe.se/2014/11/03/squeak-to-nim
...and if you want to ask questions, hop onto freenode on either #squeak, #pharo or #nim. Me and Andreas are around.
regards, Göran