"John W. Sarkela" wrote:
We have a working callback mechanism based on POSIX-compliant semaphores that we are preparing for release. It is fully synchronous now, but we are planning on support for asynchronous call-in (to Squeak) as well.
Interesting!
We are preparing a VM plug-in that provides this mechanism through a .so on Unixesque systems.
That's great!
It is easy to see how Mac and Windows-32 ports may be made. There is a little bit of portable C-code to operate the platform semaphore mechanisms. The rest is in Smalltalk 'Slang' and regular Smalltalk. We have tested an implementation that used additional primitives in the VM. We are reimplementing these as a named-primitive plugin.
That's nice. It's good to have as many named pluggable prims as possible: - more readable, - less changes at the core VM, - pluggable.
We are planning to make this available by the time of Camp Smalltalk, but may be able to post something sooner.
We have posted this notice because we are seeing a good number of calls for this capability. We can serve as the center for this effort if the community is receptive.
We would like to advance this in the context of a generalized message capability.
Sounds very fundamental: perhaps this should be synchronized with SqC...
Thank you for your efforts!
Greetings,
Stephan