Actually you are wrong, its not hard to use C libraries from Pharo. UFFI is not a restart, its a continuation of Nativeboost , they are very similar.
Pharo FFI, whether its the old FFI, Alien, Nativeboost or UFFI, is more or less the same. In the end an FFI is defined by C syntax , Pharo UFFI borrows the easy of use of Nativeboost that allows you to take c functions definition and use them as they are with a simple copy paste. Pharo is also is based on very good integration with C , like Squeak can output its code as C code via the Slang interface though it comes with some limitations. The availability of C libraries to Pharo is a reflection of the community size. Comparing with Ruby is very unfair , as Ruby is vastly more popular (think in thousand times) , hence why you see so many C libraries wrapped for Ruby. Of course python kicks Ruby ass kung fu style with its vastly superior array of C wrapped libraries. The moment you decide to use an unpopular language as Pharo then if you are not prepared to get your hands dirty and you expect things on your plate like Ruby or Python , then its time to go back to Ruby or Python. Pharo is not in flux , its evolving, every new tool or library you see is an evolution of something else. We dont need Gems for Pharo, Dale has done a great job with Metacello, its easy to make a pharo project in git/github and have it install all pharo code and built C libraries wrapped for Pharo. Just because people are not in the habit of doing this does not mean its not super easy to be done. For example AFAIK my project ChronosManager was one of the first project to install from Catalog Browser not only its Pharo code but also , pngs and audio files. I made even an autoupdate feature that pings my github repo to see if there are any new commits and then if so it alerts the user and give him the ability to download the update with a single click. All that is metacello. Metacello is probably one of the best if not the best package distribution systems out there. Definetly vastly better than Python's PyPi and Node'js NPM . I cannot praise it enough and I have no problem criticising Pharo when I must. Dale has done an amazing job, period. On the GUI front on the other hand, its messy, no doubt about it. Morphic is huge, ugly and almost not maintained. Bloc is probably going to be the next step. I think the issue here is that we dont have Arduino or Raspberry Pi guys. Same story for my field, 3d graphics. There is a OpenGL wrapper and the Wodden graphics engine and nothing else. I and the author of Woden are the only people here interested into 3d graphics, he makes Woden, I have made a bridge with Blender Python , for using Pharo to make Blender addons and I am now in the process of making a bridge with Unreal Engine. I dont see why you would have an issue using Pharo from Raspberry Pi, we already support SDL and you can even run Pharo with no GUI from the terminal and export any Pharo method as a command line argument. My Python socket bridge also showed me that is dead easy to connect Pharo with other programming languages, in my case python , with just a few hundred lines of code. Typical IPC. So there are no excuses for not using Pharo, from there on, it depends on your specific needs and wants and taste. On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 7:05 PM Todd Blanchard <tblanch...@mac.com> wrote: > > On Oct 21, 2016, at 07:30, Norbert Hartl <norb...@hartl.name> wrote: > > The current (!) complaint is rather based on the fact that everything > regarding the graphics backend, widget and tools appears sometimes as an > indefinite loop of reinventing stuff and improving and never get the job > done. Did I mention 64bit, UFFI,… I'm glad all these topics are worked one > and I see a bright future if half of them are done. But then sometimes it > looks rather dark and the light at the end of the tunnel just went off :) > > > I feel you. > > I very much want to use Pharo to build devices from things like Raspberry > Pi's, iPhones, and Androids. I need access to native libraries. You can't > rewrite everything ever in Smalltalk and I don't really see a good reason > to. > > I've taken about ten years off from doing Smalltalk and I'm trying to get > back into it. My interest is piqued because I want to build nice custom > systems using the nifty new cheap goodies like Arduinos and RPis and it > seems tossing together a full screen Pharo image would be a great way to > build these appliances. In that time the story for how to call out to > native code has changed...twice. Everything is broken or in flux again. > > To me, it doesn't feel like there's any more platform to build apps on > than there was ten years ago and everything is still "just around the > corner". Pharo seem to be an experiment in building next generation > programming tools using deprecated last generation programming tools. I > don't see a lot of useful programs being built atop it - largely because > the base is constantly shifting about. > > It is disheartening that the Ruby guys can crank out gems with native > libraries that compile and work on every platform and pharo is still > constantly half broken with loadable native code "doable" but only with > great effort. > > I looked and Moz2D doesn't seem to have a light weight build for Raspberry > Pi. Is hitching Pharo to a heavy weight graphics library as a core > requirement a good idea? > > I'm starting to think maybe we need something like Gems for Pharo - > dynamically loadable libraries and resources - compiled at install if > necessary. >
