Re: Languages with well-integrated Foreign Function Interface to learn from?

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Christoffer_Lern=F6?= <lerno@dragonascendant.com> writes:
>I'd like to research FFI in various languages, basically to find the
>best FFI-solution and copy from that one.
>It's likely that I will restrict myself to interfacing with C, so if
>there are elegant solutions integrating with C, and more clunky but
>flexible that are more general, I probably prefer the ones that
>exclusively target C.
>
>What I'm looking for is syntax, to what extent automatic conversion of
>arguments are done, how to handle callbacks, memory management, how to
>create structured data (i.e. structs in the case of C) etc.


You may find the following paper interesting:


@InProceedings{ertl07euroforth,
    author = "M. Anton Ertl",
    title = "Gforth's libcc {C} Function Call Interface",
    booktitle = "23rd EuroForth Conference",
    year = "2007",
    editor = "M. Anton Ertl",
    pages = "7--11",
    URL = "http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/papers/ertl07euroforth.ps.gz",
    pdfurl = "http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/euroforth2007/papers/ertl.pdf",
    OPTnote = "not refereed",
    abstract = "A major problem in our earlier proposal for a C
interface was that a part of the interface was not
portable between platforms. The libcc interface solves
this problem by using a C compiler and its
\code{.h}-files. The \code{.h}-files contain knowledge
about the specific platform, and the C compiler
automatically inserts the necessary conversions between
Forth and C types. In this paper we describe the libcc
implementation and interface. We also discuss how a
Forth-C interface might be standardized.",
}


Another thing you will want to look at is SWIG <www.swig.org>.


>[[...] all the FFI seems rather ad-hoc and language specific. -John]


There are lots of language-specific problems (e.g., the type systems
of the two languages involved, or the interaction of the garbage
collector with the C functions), so I think that it's necessary to be
language-specific, although SWIG tries to at least factor out the
language-independent parts.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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