[OFFTOPIC] Re: External API's: XS, Pickle, Win32::API, FFI, C::DynaLib etc.

This issue has little to do with Perl 6, or even Perl, per se.

Garrett Goebel <[email protected]> wrote:
> There's an awful lot of Win32 modules that depend on Win32::API to
> dynamically call functions from Win32 API *.dll's. There is pretty good
> evidence that there are Perl programmers out there that what to dynamically
> call C functions from libraries without writing XS glue code or requiring a
> C compiler. 

Support for calling arbitrary C functions without a C compiler is hard
to implement and port.  GNU ffcall looks like a good, portable
implementation, for which FFI.pm is an attempt at a Perl wrapper, but,
as you pointed out, ffcall is under GPL.

Since this issue mainly affects Windows users (I assume), probably the
best solution is a Windows-specific module that does not try for much
beyond duplicating Visual Basic's capability in this area.

-- 
John Tobey, late nite hacker <[email protected]>
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]]]             With enough bugs, all eyes are shallow.           [[[
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