I can't speak to that, but the callouts of Alien have been at best damned by faint praise; FFI's weakness in callbacks is clear, so an enhancement of FFI with Alien's acknowledged strengths seems like a natural approach. Hopefully the handling of structure fields will improve at the same time.
________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joachim Geidel [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2010 1:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Alien + Cog VM Hi Eliot, Am 26.12.10 19:11 schrieb Eliot Miranda: >> What exactly does "Alien callouts will die" mean? Does it mean that the >> Alien class library is deprecated and will be replaced by a new version of >> FFI? Or is it something else? > > It means what it says; that the callout primitives in Alien will die and all > the rest will remain. FFI callouts will accept Aliens and, because they have > type information, render the Alien call-outs redundant and problematic. The > Alien data representation and callback facilities will be retained. Thanks for the clarification! This sounds as if upgrading a class library from the current version of Alien to the new one won't be much work. Joachim Geidel
