Hi Igor, at least for me because i didn't have to play with primitives and plugins. Even though i can, because i created a couple of them. But i really liked that you can easily code everything in smallttalk, using the Alien abstractions, and reify the library and the methods in the image. Fernando On Mar 25, 2010, at 6:30 PM, Igor Stasenko wrote:

On 25 March 2010 18:54, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab@gmx.de> wrote:

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On 3/25/2010 9:48 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote:

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There's no doubt in my mind. Absolutely nobody is going to spend time optimizing their callout interface manually. They use the stuff that's there. Go look at AlienOpenGL. Go look at Newspeak. That's your answer right there. I have still to see a single example of a (non-contrived) usage of Alien that's faster than the equivalent (non-contrived) FFI call.

Point taken. Yes, you have to be a lot more clever to optimize such calls for your use scenarios, which, as you said, makes writing an application a lot more tedious process. But it is the price we pay, when need something to be heavily optimized, isnt?

True, but in that case, why not go straight to a plugin:

primitiveGlGetError <export: true> interpreterProxy pop: interpreterProxy methodArgumentCount+1. interpreterProxy pushInteger: self glGetError.

That's going to be faster than anything else.

Then i really wonder, why people find an Alien so attractive?

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Cheers, - Andreas

-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.