Hi joachim
could you spend some time and helping us to write a documentation on
nativeboost?
Else it will always stay the same. I cannot systematically try to write
documentation on things I do not have expertise
because it is killing me.
For igor everything is obvious :) but we spent some afternoons improving
the x11 tutorial.
Stef
On 30/5/14 08:50, Joachim Geidel wrote:
Hello Clément,
Am 29.05.2014 um 17:23 schrieb Clément Bera <bera.clem...@gmail.com
<mailto:bera.clem...@gmail.com>>:
NativeBoost is clearly the best option because it is the fastest, it
is mostly implemented in the image so you can look at the code and it
is by default in the image.
FFI from the VM typically manages much better callbacks, so if you
plan to extensively use callbacks you should look at it, by loading
the package of Aliens (It does not rely any more on the old
implementation of aliens but still have the same image side API and
library). Alternatively you can improve NativeBoost so it manages
better call back, this is "easy" as it is mostly implemented in the
image.
Could you explain why FFI is better at managing callbacks? I have used
NativeBoost or implementing JNIPort, and callbacks were one of the
easier parts of the work I had to do. As far as I know, both FFI and
NativeBoost don’t support callbacks from threads other than the thread
in which the Smalltalk code is executed, but that’s a limitation of
both of them.
As to improving NativeBoost: That’s not „easy“ at all. Some parts of
it are quite cryptic if you are not familiar with x86 assembler code,
the documentation is still sparse, and I am under the impression that
there are some unfinished parts. It is practically impossible to add
something to NativeBoost if you are not Igor, and just want to use it
for your own project as opposed to spending many hours trying to
figure out how NativeBoost works. I was somewhat lucky that I found
everything I needed in the archives of the pharo-dev and pharo-users
mailing list., but i wouldn’t call this documentation.
I explained how to compile and bind a dll with NativeBoost here
(subsection Implementing the FFI calls) :
http://clementbera.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/optimizing-pharo-to-c-speed-with-nativeboost-ffi/
It is a very basic but very simple example.
Yes, this page helped, but as you wrote: basic and simple example -
the more involved stuff remains undocumented. When working on JNIPort,
I struggled with simple things like de-referencing a pointer to a
pointer to a struct etc. - I didn’t find documentation for this, and
this is a basic feature in my opinion.
Best regards,
Joachim Geidel
Additional examples can be found in the class NBBasicExamples in the
package NativeBoost-Examples.
There are also tests (For example NBFFICallbackTests>>#benchQSort)
that you can look at, they work and show how to use NativeBoost.
Else there is the chapter in Pharo for the entrerprise. Other people
will give you a link.
