Re: [ANN] Winapi - a minimal but useful Windows API binding

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

2011/6/9 Ignacio Burgueño <ignaciob@inconcertcc.com>:
> Hi Steve. This looks really nice. How does it compare to this other binding
> [1] by Jerome Vuarand?

They seem complementary. I will confess to the usual sin of not doing
a more thorough literature search.

It's hard to know when to stop when binding something like the Windows
API.  Some things are best dealt with with a portable existing
solution (like FTP and HTTP protocols) and some things may be outside
the scope of a 'minimal' binding (for instance, a little lightweight
GUI toolkit)

The async angle is important. The rule I've enforced is that only one
Lua callback can be active at a time, and in a GUI application it's
also important to dispatch the callback so that it happens in the main
thread.  Unfortunately it's not so easy to hijack Lua file objects -
it can be done for regular Lua (which exposes a metatable for userdata
which just points to a FILE*) but this does not work for LuaJIT.
Perhaps an io.fdopen function would be generally useful, even if only
exposed on the API level.

The ultimate aim is to define a API which provides a reasonable
intersection of the facilities provided by different platforms. For
instance, Jeff Pohlmeyer's xctrl module can also send fake input to
windows, and enumerate top-level windows for X.

steve d.