[Help-smalltalk] Re: freeglut and opengl bindings

[Paolo Bonzini]

> With SWIG, we get instant access to bindings for a lot of libs.
> Sometime back, took a look at the SWIG manual but my smalltalk is
> quite poor and I never really got the time to learn the language
> properly. Gotta do something about that...

Actually, most of porting SWIG would be about C/C++ coding.  It creates 
C/C++ wrappers for all the functions -- quite different from what Brad 
has done so far, for example -- which accept language objects and call 
the underlying function.  It could actually be faster if we had a 
primitive to do a C call directly, with no interpretation in cint.c.

While I was working on speeding up C call-outs, I just added a small 
feature.  If you declare a method with <cCall: 'function'> (i.e. no 
returning: or args: keywords), it is the same as passing all the 
arguments as #smalltalk, plus (if the method is on the instance side) 
passing the receiver as #selfSmalltalk.  This would be the calling 
convention that SWIG needs, and the new syntax (which is only a shortcut 
so far) might be transformed to a primitive if the SWIG plan materialized.

Paolo