Thanks a lot for the hints and the in-depth explanation!

Is there a best practice on how to deal with my scenario in the most elegant way? Inside the primitive call I learn how much memory I need and get the pointer to it. Calculating the size ahead of time is unfortunately not possible. So in order to allocate the memory in squeak, I would have to return the pointer from the primitive, right? Do I simply place it in an integer or is there a dedicated data structure? Or do I have to go all the way and return a handle that only lives for the duration of the two primitive calls?

I second what Jakob said very much. I really like the HelpBrowser approach and its possibility to just place do-it-able code inside it. Having a chapter on the very basics of plugin building would be awesome (like e.g. explaining what all the push/popRemappableOop stuff is all about).

Thanks again! Tom

On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 2:03 AM tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:

Extending the help system is an excellent idea. A very good first job might be to properly condense all the items currently in the Help docking bar menu into the help browser and then get rid of those menu items.

Having everything within the help browser would have the desirable side effect of making it unnecessary to fix the odd behaviour shown if you choose Help->The Squeak User Interface (as one example) - the help browser opens on that section, which is nice, but if you should happen to click on the ‘Search Results’ list entry then your help goes away and there is no way to retrieve it (other than starting from the beginning).

A help browser is an excellent place for longer form explanations of what a part of the system does and how it does it, tying together multiple classes and code scattered around. Making sure that there are pointers to the class-specific comments (or perhaps embedding them?) within those larger help articles would be smart. Likewise having pointers from a class to any help article that discusses it would be nice. I very much like the way some help articles have executable examples with in them - full marks to whoever has provided them. Having the window menus for the main tools able to open a help browser aimed at the doc for the tool would be nice.

The most important thing about any help system is that it is actually used, so that it becomes a worthwhile habit to look in it for information. It isn’t too hard to make a tool that is easy to add information to, nor to make it easy to find stuff within. The real trick is getting everyone to remember to add well-written articles to it.

tim

tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Fractured Idiom:- PORTE-KOCHERE - Sacramental wine