Re: [ANN] luaffi

["Mark Meijer" <meijer78@...>]

I haven't used Alien yet, but I remember reading on the site that it
currently works only on Linux and Mac. Or at least hasn't been tested
on any other platforms. What about LuaFFI?

On a side note, I recently stumbled upon dyncall ( http://dyncall.org/
). Looks interesting.


2008/8/18 Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@gmx.net>:
> On 04/08/2008 20:09, A.S. Bradbury wrote:
>>
>> I hate to ask a question I could answer myself, but I'm going to do it
>> anyway - have you benchmarked luaffi vs compiled lua bindings at all?
>> Clearly for some sorts of library most of the work will be being done
>> on the C code, so the cost of the function call is negligible but for
>> other applications (maybe a datastructure implementation?) the cost of
>> the call would be more important.
>
> I don't think this kind of library is designed to replace a good native
> wrapper. Although it can be used to prototype one.
> The way I see its main use is to allow easy access to a large set of API
> functions which are rarely used. An obvious (for me!) use is to access the
> very big Win32 API: you cannot imagine wrapping each and every function
> there.
> For example you might write a GUI wrapper to do common, usual base window
> tasks (creating base components, getting and setting base information
> from/to them) but you might want to leave some obscure, rarely used
> functions, letting users access them with a FFI call if needed: less work,
> less bloat, more flexibility.
>
> --
> Philippe Lhoste
> --  (near) Paris -- France
> --  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
> --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
>
>