Posted by Mariano Martinez Peck on Apr 21, 2010; 11:46pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/How-To-Bind-To-External-Libraries-in-Pharo-tp2019262p2019860.html

Hi Bill. You have 2 possibilities:

1) Use FFI. With this you can call C functions from shared libraries. No need to recompile de VM. Main problem: it locks the whole VM while the function is being run. The FFI is included in most VMs so it is easy. What you DO need to install is the smalltalk side of FFI. A simple way in Pharo is evaluating:

Gofer new
    squeaksource: 'MetacelloRepository';
    package: 'ConfigurationOfFFI';
    load.

((Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfFFI) project version: '1.2') load.

There are a lot of examples and libraries wrapped with FFI. We developed a wrapper for the OpenDBX library....the project is call SqueakDBX (www.squeakdbx.org) and would be useful if you want a real example using FFI.

FFI: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1414

2) Write your own named plugin. This is, you write your plugin in SLANG (a limited Smalltallk that it is used to write part of the vm and then translated to C) and then, using VMMaker you generate C code, and after, you can generate the binaries. Finally when you distribute your app you will need to add such plugin to the VM.

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/356
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/464


Particulary for GTK, look at the project (I think it is dead now) SqueakGTK:

http://squeakgtk.pbworks.com/

Particuolary for Gstreamer  I paste an email from John Macinstosh some time ago:

"Well I'm not sure what you are asking for.  The Gstreamer stuff starts at:

MCHttpRepository
   location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/GStreamer'
   user: ''
   password: ''

You need a plugin and the GStreamer underpinnings install in your operating system. If you have
have a linux box  that is  easy.  If you have a mac, you could use MacPorts to install GStreamer and
I could give you a plugin I built for test purposes.

As for the Sophie stuff, well it uses FFI for talking to Quicktime, there is an optional quicktime plugin
but all that is used for is to let quicktime tell us when it has rendered a frame into a squeak surface
so we can signal a squeak semaphore to draw the surface to the Display.  The fall back is to
do a fixed frame rate drawing cycle, which is what happens on Windows.

The Sophie player of course uses Tweak as a reference base, but could be converted to some other
UI framework."


Cheers

Mariano




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