From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2008-11-05T01:58:34+09:00
Subject: Re: FFI 0.1.1 (Foreign Function Interface) for Ruby 1.8.6/7 and 1.9

On Nov 4, 12:51 pm, Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Nit Khair <sentinel.2...@gmx.com> wrote:
> > Sean O'halpin wrote:
> >> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Ken Bloom <kbl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> module NCursesFFI
> >>  extend FFI::Library
> >>  ffi_lib 'ncurses'
> >>  attach_function 'clear', [], :int
> >>  attach_function 'endwin', [], :int
> >>  attach_function 'getch', [], :int
> >>  attach_function 'initscr', [], :int
> >>  attach_function 'printw', [ :string ], :int
> >>  attach_function 'refresh', [], :int
> >> end
>
> > Sean,
> > Going by the above, and the samples of structs on the blog, for a medium
> > sized library such as ncurses, there can be some effort in getting this
> > module ready. Will there be some kind of repository of such modules, so
> > we are not duplicating each others effort ?
>
> It's a fairly tedious (and largely thankless) task to convert a lib
> like ncurses. However, I'm in the mood right now so expect a github
> repo in the near future :) Your point about avoiding duplication of
> effort is a good one. The main problem in tackling something like this
> is fatigue setting in when you've got enough for your immediate
> requirement and so ending up with a half-baked conversion (I speak
> from experience). I believe another pitfall is trying to rubyify the
> interface. I think it's better to provide a thin bridge and then
> abstract on top of that. Then you get the benefit of being able to use
> existing experience and documentation (with the usual translations)
> and others can take or leave your abstraction as they see fit. (I do
> think Ruby needs a portable console library but I'd rather build that
> on top of ruby versions of ncurses and Win32 console than try to make
> ncurses work on Windows. I'm hoping FFI will make that possible.)
>

Yeah, first layer of implementation and then abstraction (Rubify) is
the way to go :-)

> I'm wondering if it would be useful to have these FFI-enabled libs
> under an ffi/ namespace, e.g. you'd require 'ffi/ncurses' and possibly
> include FFI::NCurses. We could put shared structs, constants, etc.
> under ffi/include. Any thoughts anyone?
>

Something like the win32utils team does:

gem: win32-service
gem win32-eventlog

require 'win32/service'
require 'win32/eventlog'

All these live inside Win32 namespace

I think these could be named ffi-ncourses but the name implies "FFI
implementation of ncurses" where I will love to have "cross platform
curses" (note the lack of 'n').

These should depend on ruby-ffi gem and we are set to go :-)

My to cents
--
Luis Lavena