From: Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@...>
Date: 2008-11-18T23:52:43+09:00
Subject: Re: FFI 0.1.1 (Foreign Function Interface) for Ruby 1.8.6/7 and 1.9

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:11 PM, Nit Khair <sentinel.2001@gmx.com> wrote:
>
> Eagerly awaiting your ncurses port...
>
> Is it possible for you to document the procedure, how you go about doing
> it, so one can follow that for another port, rather than be totally
> lost.

Hi,

I've just uploaded the ~very raw~ initial port of the core ncurses lib
to ruby-ffi. You can find it at:

git://github.com/seanohalpin/ffi-ncurses.git

This works with ffi-0.0.2 (which I got from the kenai project) - 0.0.1
left out typedefs for short ints.

To use:

require 'rubygems'
require 'ffi'
require 'ffi-ncurses

notes:
- example.rb shows basic usage
- to access stdscr, use the return value from NCurses.initscr
- I have not implemented any variadic functions (not supported by libffi AFAIK)
- there's also a wrapper for libdl called dlfcn.rb
- there's an experimental script (ex01-ffi-dl-stdscr.rb) which uses
dlfcn.rb to access the exported variables from the ncurses shared lib
(stdscr, curscr, etc.). This also shows how to access values returned
through pointers (see NCurses.wattr_get).

There are some rambling notes on implementation in
notes-on-ffi-curses.org. I'll tidy these up when I get some spare
time. Basically, I wrote a script
(generate-ffi-ncurses-function-signatures.rb) that mechanically
recovered the function signatures from the ncurses.h on my machine and
added some constants. I wasted a lot of time figuring out how to
access exported variables.

I've only just done a final test on OS X Tiger - haven't checked Linux
yet (should work but...)

I have not set up a project for this yet so please send any bug
reports, questions, etc. directly to me for the moment.

There are no tests - I wonder if anyone has any ideas how best to
write specs/tests for checking this kind of output?

Regards,
Sean