Brad Watson wrote:
Is it better to use the dynamic library linking
mechanism or the dynamic module linking system for
ncurses ?
I don't know it very well, but the possibilities are:
- use a module only: ok if the library is very small and a lot of
functions need wrappers; see examples/gdbm.st for an example, or the
regex module in 2.2 (now it's in the main image).
- use a library only: ok if the library is possibly complicated, but its
interface is such that it needs no wrappers; an example is when you use
functions from libc, or in the MD5 package.
- use a module *and* a library: ok if the library is quite big, and it
has an interface that is quite complicated so that it is necessary to
manipulate Smalltalk objects in the wrapper. The most obvious example
is GTK.
I think that ncurses fits in case 2 -- only a library -- especially
because it is simple and its interface does not involve callbacks from
ncurses into user code. Maybe you will need some C code in order to run
some initialization code or to handle SIGWINCH. In this case you may
have a very thin module just to implement this (you have a very handy
place to set up the initialization code in gst_initModule), but still
most of the functionality would be provided by linking the ncurses library.
Paolo
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