I woke up this morning and was wondering if it is possible to create a message API for C for communicating to a running Pharo VM; wrap the API in a preprocessor that abstracts away the calls with objective-C syntax.
At the moment, Pharo is significantly simpler to get than GNUstep, and I feel is far cleaner of an environment than GNUstep. I want to write Objective C on Windows, but I can't without getting GNUstep, and I don't want to get GNUstep because I have bad past experience with getting it to run. By creating such a framework, you can write programs in objective C, run them through a preprocessor to turn objective-c constructs to the corresponding message calls(via sockets/pipes/etc)/create corresponding anonymous structs/dispatch tables. And then you can have a C program talk to the Pharo VM. Perhaps even spawn a fresh Pharo VM(In this case it would essentially act like Java, where java command spawns the virtual machines). This would allow native code that seamlessly uses the Pharo VM to deal with managed structures such a strings, hashmaps, arraylists(std::vector-like structures), and interacts with them via sending messages. In essence, it would be C-Pharo network interface which communicates via passing JSON back and forth over a network, where the pharo structures would be recovered from runtime by using a tagged union(variant) type, and sent to pharo by being wrapped in a variant type. What do you guys think about this absurd idea? -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Can-Pharo-VM-be-altered-to-act-like-GNUStep-as-well-tp4918693.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
