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Postings from July 2000
It'd be good to see a nice cross-platform mechanism to perform foreign function calls from shared libaries... that didn't consist of writing lots of C code or mystic XS macros. - XS is hard to learn and unapproachable to most Perl programmers with little C coding experience. - Pickle looks like a better XS. But I don't know much about it - Win32::API is Win32 only, makes some big assumptions, over simplifies types, lacks support for callbacks, etc. - C::DynaLib is *NIX only (Win32 support recently dropped) - FFI.pm is nice, but not yet ready for primetime (issues with changes in DynaLoader between 5.005.03 and 5.6.0 resulting in not being able to find/load the appropriate library). FFI.pm requires the gnu ffcall with its viral GPL license... FFI includes a LGPL wrapper, but GPL is GPL is GPL is a problem. 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. Is there any good writeup on why anyone should prefer XS glue over something like Win32::API, C::DynaLib, or FFI.pm? GarrettThread Next