From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-11-03T19:01:11+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FFI 0.1.1 (Foreign Function Interface) for Ruby 1.8.6/7 and 1.9

Sylvain Joyeux wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 08:16:39AM +0900, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
>> The JRuby team is proud to announce the release of FFI for Ruby 1.8.6/7  
>> and 1.9!
>>
>> FFI (gem install ffi) is a library for programmatically loading dynamic  
>> libraries, binding functions within them, and calling those functions  
>> from Ruby code. Here's a quick sample of binding and calling the getpid  
>> C library function:
> 
> Interesting. On what kind of architectures is the binding part working ? I'm
> using dyncall to do the actual interfacing work (http://www.dyncall.org/) in a
> DL-replacement library, but my problem is that dyncall does not like Linux-PPC.
> What are you using on your side ?

Ruby FFI uses libffi, as does JNA which ships with JRuby. I'm not 
certain about libffi specifically. but JNA claims to support OSX (ppc, 
x86, x86_64), linux (x86, amd64), FreeBSD/OpenBSD (x86, amd64), Solaris 
(x86, amd64, sparc, sparcv9) and Windows (x86, amd64).

I'm not sure if linux-ppc support is not provided because it's not 
supported or because nobody has a linux-ppc machine to build on. The 
latter has been the case for several entries on the list; I myself was 
the build monkey for Solaris/AMD64 and Linux/AMD64 for a short time, 
before which there was no shipped support.

There's certainly one way to find out...gem install ffi. Report back 
here or on ruby-ffi mailing lists what you learn :)

http://kenai.com/projects/ruby-ffi

- Charlie