[Yaml-core] Syck for Squeak?

[Ned K. <ne...@bi...>]

I was looking at the Syck from CVS.

It wasn't clear to me what the extent of Syck actually was, first; it 
seemed like the contents of the syck/lib directory would be it, but 
then there's a lot in ext/ruby/ext/syck that look like they might 
overlap. Anyway...

I was thinking about adding YAML support to Squeak by using Syck. We 
can get to external code via plugins.

However, it's not really possible to call back to the Squeak 
interpreter from plugin code, so parse() would have to be more or 
less atomic (not all the platforms that support Squeak support 
OS-level threads, so I can't just spin off a thread to do the 
parsing). I can do some object allocation, though, in plugin code if 
that would help (and set instance variables, etc. if necessary). But 
I can't guarantee that the allocated objects wouldn't get moved 
during garbage collection.

It would probably work better to have the parse_handler collect all 
the nodes from Syck in a big table (or even array) somewhere and then 
let the Squeak code iterate through them after parse() finishes. 

Some questions:

* is the node that is returned from the parser via the parse_handler 
then deallocated after the handler returns? It looks like it is if it 
isn't used as an anchor, right? So I'd have to copy it to somewhere 
else.

* What about the memory that's pointed to by the node? Is that 
deallocated too?

* is the parse_handler responsible for setting the SYMID in the node? 
Seems like if the handler generates the SYMID then the node can't 
have a proper one set when it is passed to the handler.

Thanks,
-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE