Doing it better 2000-06-08 a
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> > Incidentally, what does that application (engine behind
> > Java/Python/Perl) tell us about data representation? I don't understand.
>
> Java/Python/Perl can intercall with C, passing data structures back and
> forth. Rather than having laboriously to convert them to native
> structures, they have a simple mapping; they can just cast.

Actually that isn't true. In Java, you have to do a clever conversion. In
Python, you need to worry about allocating memory that isn't going to
move, using a library specially designed to reveal that horror. I'm not
sure how to do it in Perl.

> Imagine a plugin filter for Photoshop that is compiled under sMite. It
> would have to manipulate bitmaps in place (no telling how big they might
> be, so copying and converting them if the filter had to be applied to the
> whole bitmap at once would be out of the question).

In MIN, this would not be a problem, because it is lazy. Effectively, you
don't provide the MIN-friendly data per se, but a MIN-friendly interface
to a trivial native program that can access the data. In fact, you could
even provide an intelligent one, which only accesses data which it is
asked to access.

Alistair