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. For instance you would not want to create a dll for pharo
code when you can have an image and live object that offer far more
flexibility of code that can modify itself even on runtime. People
choose dynamic languages for the very reason that want to avoid such
complications and limitations.
If you dont mind workarounds the then answer changes from "no"
to "yes".
You could of course create a CAD plugin that triggers pharo and
pass information to it through sockets , pipes or other ways of
application communication. Its a workaround but it works and I have
seen it used in 3d apps. For example in blender that support mainly
python addons , I know of a python addon (city generator addon) that
uses Java libraries. In this case you create a "bridge" between your
CAD application and Pharo and you make the two work together. The good
news is that if Pharo crashes , it wont crash your CAD app so that a
good thing about this workaround. The bad news is that you would be
responsible to expose the CAD functionality to Pharo meaning you will
have to create a bridge between pharo and CAD. Of course you will need
to expose only the functionality that your plugin uses to Pharo so its
not as hard as it may sound.
To paraphrase a favorite quote "good coders invent , great
coders cheat " ;)
So yes there definetly many roads that lead to Rome. If you are
determined to use Pharo nothing will stop you.
About debugging nativeboost of course you can use the pharo
debugger because nativeboost commands are fully pharo compliant ,
meaning they are like everything else, messages and objects. For the
machine code generated by nativeboost you can use a C debugger like gdb
that could let you disassemble the code to see whats wrong with it.
