Re: [Help-smalltalk] ncurses calls

[Paolo Bonzini]

Brad Watson wrote:
> Is it better to use the dynamic library linking
> mechanism or the dynamic module linking system for
> ncurses ?
>
>   
I don't know it very well, but the possibilities are:

- use a module only: ok if the library is very small and a lot of 
functions need wrappers; see examples/gdbm.st for an example, or the 
regex module in 2.2 (now it's in the main image).

- use a library only: ok if the library is possibly complicated, but its 
interface is such that it needs no wrappers; an example is when you use 
functions from libc, or in the MD5 package.

- use a module *and* a library: ok if the library is quite big, and it 
has an interface that is quite complicated so that it is necessary to 
manipulate Smalltalk objects in the wrapper.  The most obvious example 
is GTK.

I think that ncurses fits in case 2 -- only a library -- especially 
because it is simple and its interface does not involve callbacks from 
ncurses into user code.  Maybe you will need some C code in order to run 
some initialization code or to handle SIGWINCH.  In this case you may 
have a very thin module just to implement this (you have a very handy 
place to set up the initialization code in gst_initModule), but still 
most of the functionality would be provided by linking the ncurses library.

Paolo