Recently Pablo Tesone published an example of embedding a Pharo image as a Windows resource inside a program written in C.

Well, the excellent and, like Smalltalk, vastly underrated Free Pascal programming system has cross-platform support for handling Windows resources. With it, I have reimplemented Pablo's example: One source code building executables that run on Ubuntu 18.04 and MacOS Mojave. Not tested on Windows yet, but I'm sure it'll work there too. The three Pascal source files, including blank lines and comments, total 209 lines:

• ulibPharoVM.pas, FFI to libPharoVMCore, comprising one data type and two functions.

• ulibEmbeddedImage.pas, implementing the functions called by libPharoVMCore to access the Pharo image that is embedded as a Windows resource.

• runPharoEmbedded.pas, the main program which is pretty much a straight port of Pablo's C program.

Repository on GH. More details to come.

Tags: embedded, FFI, headless, Pascal