User Extensions/Externals

Paul D. DeRocco pderocco at ix.netcom.com
Mon May 3 14:11:24 EDT 2010


> From: J. Landman Gay
>
>
> The dummy stack trick is just a clever work-around to allow you to load
> an external on demand. It isn't required. It sounds like what changed
> was the standalone builder rather than the way externals work, but I'm
> not sure either how that works under the hood.
>
> Sometimes I wish that dummy stack trick hadn't been announced. It's very
> handy when you need it for some reason in particular, but it causes a
> lot of confusion too. I never use it.

The reason I've been using it is that I'm building externals for Windows and
OS X, and the name of the external file (the extension, actually) is
different. This means I need to run a bit of Rev code to build the correct
pathname, using ".dll" under Windows and ".bundle" under OS X. You can't do
that if you make the pathname a static property of the main stack.

Another way to do it is to build one external, then edit the property, and
build the other. But that makes the process of building the external,
something that one may do over and over, very tedious.

I posted a feature suggestion in the forum that you be allowed to leave the
extension off, and have the run-time library automatically add the extension
appropriate to the platform when it loads the extension, so that this would
all be unnecessary. Alternatively, the action of saving the standalone could
supply the correct extension. Or, the stack could be given separate
properties for the externals for different OSes, so you could set all of
them differently.

If you have a better way to deal with this in the present version, I'm all
ears.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco at ix.netcom.com




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