From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2008-11-14T02:29:22+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FFI 0.1.1 (Foreign Function Interface) for Ruby 1.8.6/7	and 1.9

Very cool!

I don't know how I missed this before, somehow slipped past my mental
filter (and now everything you were talking about at RubyConf starts to
make a lot more sense... :).

One question: a complaint I've had with DL is that it requires that I
specify the dynamic library that contains symbols I'm interested in.  Is
this necessary with FFI?  Can FFI be used to call functions in the Ruby
standard library when Ruby is not build with --enable-shared?

If so, I'd be interested in using this for Ludicrous to avoid having to
hard-code all the function pointers to the Ruby API functions I want to
call.  That would mean, though, I would need FFI to be able to give me a
real function pointer (so I can pass the pointer to libjit.. I can
imagine this being useful for other cases as well).

Paul