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

On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, John Tobey wrote:

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

It sort of does. If anyone cares to continue this, the internals list
(perl6-internals) would be the place.
 
> 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]>
> \\\                                                               ///
> ]]]             With enough bugs, all eyes are shallow.           [[[
> ///                                                               \\\
>