Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 00:15:10 -0400
To: Paul Moore <[email protected]>
Subject: FFI patch
I've just now written a patch to FFI-1.00 to improve installation.
Basically, it wouldn't install on my vanilla linux box, so I spent
a few minutes "dusting".
1.01 Thu Jun 19 22:04:59 2003
Installation improvements.
- FFI now uses the _installed_ ffcall libraries and headers,
rather than those in the ./ffcall directory.
- Linux installation now works.
- Fixed two warnings in FFI.xs.
- Replaced the old ./ffcall contents with the current ffcall-1.8.
- t/basic.t now uses Test, and win32.t was tweaked. Hopefully the
automated module testers will now be happier.
My underlying motivation is that the Tiny C Compiler
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/tcc/ provides a linkable library to do
runtime C code compilation and linking (quickly, without disk, though
currently x86 only). Which I am inclined to wrap (SWIG) as a module,
and then create an Inline module on top of it. But tcc itself does
not, of course, provide any perl glue. One can use Inline::C, but
that's rather heavy weight (libtcc compiles and links a small function
in a few microseconds, but Inline::C takes 1000x longer to compile and
link an interface function, with glue, the old fashioned way). So I
went to look at FFI, but had difficulties. Which seemed unfortunate,
as I'd like folks to more often consider using runtime code generation.
So I puttered for a bit, and got it working.
There is a copy of my proposed FFI-1.01 at
[...]
FFI-1.01.tar.gz
Paul isn't supporting FFI anymore, and I can't take it on, so I post this here.
Fyi, the [email protected] address no longer works.
And yes, I should have said milliseconds, not microseconds.
Notes:
Doables:
History:
2003-Aug-11 Online.
2003-Jun-19 The patch.