this is why i said " Theoretically of course its possible , but someone would need to implement this to make it easy to do and currently AFAIK none has.".
Please note I was talking about Pharo. Even if you take into account Slang , pharo is not compiling to C, it has actually a completely different ideology to C. C/C++ does what it does because it favors raw performance, Pharo does what it does because its favors ease of use , simplicity and flexibility. So its definitely doable technically but the questions is "do you REALLY want to do this". The sort answer NO with the exceptions depending on the situation. Because you don't want to further complicate your life. On the issue of embedding I think its a good option to have but something I rather avoid. If you want to know why , then read this very well written article for python http://twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph/rant/extendit.html. To sum up extending is just better than embedding because it allow you to put focus on your language of choice and take full advantage of its merits. Blender the 3d app , written in C/C++ , embeds python for its addon architecture. Python makes the addons and also manages the GUI. I can tell you there are clear advantages to have blender as python library instead of embedding python inside blender. It would offer a lot easier customization of blender. But since all developers of Blender are C/C++ developers , embedding seemed like an "obvious" solution to them. Mostly because they saw python as a third class citizent in their app. But with blender addons popping up like mushrooms , python has played such a central role to Blender that now it compromises 12% of the 1 million lines of code , blender's code base. 12% might not seem much but once you figure out that python is generally 2-5 times less verbose than C/C++ it become a huge number. Take also to account the world in general move towards dynamic languages mainly because they make life easier and more manageable. For me its far more important to improve Nativeboost and create high quality documentation for it even before considering embedding pharo. On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Friedrich Dominicus < [email protected]> wrote: > kilon alios <[email protected]> writes: > > > Sort answer is no , Pharo does not try to replace C/C++. CAD plugins > > are indeed dlls and you will need C/C++ for that. I only Know Free > > Pascal as another language to generate DLLs but even in that case its > > extra work. > > > > So if you look for the most direct solution then Pharo wont cut it and > > probably most other programming languages. > > > > Theoretically of course its possible , but someone would need to > > implement this to make it easy to do and currently AFAIK none has. > > > > Bare in mind that DLLs are strictly a C/C++ invention and definitely > > not how highly dynamic languages like Pharo work so there is no direct > > need for Pharo to do such thing cause it would complicate the > > workflow. > I don't this is entirely true. AFAIKT Except Smalltalk can be used for > generateing DLLs. However they are "compiling" to C AFAIKT. I'm quite > sure that one can use ObjectArts Smalltalk also to generate niche Active > X and I bet also shared libraries. > > Regards > Friedrich > > > >
