From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-12-03T12:42:24+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FFI 0.2.0

Awesome, and thanks for the continued work in parallel on keeping 
JRuby's FFI feature-for-feature compatible :)

Anyone released any notable FFI-based replacements for C extensions yet? 
Sean? ffi-ncurses up for a release soon?

Wayne Meissner wrote:
> Greetings Rubyists.
> 
> The JRuby team is proud to announce the release of 0.2.0 of FFI for
> Ruby.  This release is compatible with the FFI implementation released
> in JRuby 1.1.6
> 
> Get it via 'gem install ffi' or download the source and/or gem files
> from the project page at http://kenai.com/projects/ruby-ffi
> 
> Special thanks to:
> 
> Yehuda Katz
> Luc  Heinrich
> Andrea Fazzi
> Mike Dalessio
> Hongli Lai
> 
> 
> 
> Highlights of changes since 0.1.1:
> 
> - About 25% faster function invocation.  This is probably not that
> important, since as soon as you start putting significant ruby code
> around any native call, the native call overhead becomes a bit of a
> wash.  Still, the first thing people do is benchmarks, so speeding it
> up a bit was probably worth it.
> 
> - type definitions for size_t, ssize_t, etc autogenerated when ffi gem
> is installed.
> 
> - variadic function support (from Luc Heinrich <luc@honk-honk.com>)
> 
> - nil can be passed as a string argument (from Luc Heinrich
> <luc@honk-honk.com>)
> 
> - FFI libraries can now be mixed in to other modules. (from Luc
> Heinrich <luc@honk-honk.com>)
> 
> - uses system libffi if it is new enough.  This really only works
> under very recent linux distributions and libffi from macports.
> 
> - Better library name mangling.  Now when an absolute path is set as
> ffi_lib, no name mangling occurs.  Also on Linux, if you request 'c'
> or 'libc.so' as the library, it is converted into 'libc.so.6'
> 
> - Multiple libraries can be specified.  This is once again, useful on
> linux, where you have to specify the exact version of a library, but
> you want it to work on other platforms too.  e.g. ffi_lib 'ncurses',
> 'libncurses.so.5'
> 
> - Many, many more specs.  Most specs now run against the included
> libtest native library.  It is still a long way from 100% test
> coverage, but its better than 0.1 was.
> 
> - Better tainted string handling.  All strings originating in native
> code - i.e. returned from a function, or obtained from a pointer or
> buffer via get_string() are tainted.  If a tainted string is passed to
> a native function, an error is raised.
> 
> - automatic Struct layout.  This means you can specify the layout as
> an array of name, type pairs and the offset and size will be
> automatically calculated.
> 
> - Fixed specs and rbxspecs rake targets (Patch from Hongli Lai
> <hongli@phusion.nl>)
> 
> - FFI.errno will now return the errno set by the last native function call
> 
> - Memory allocated for Buffer and MemoryPointer is guaranteed to be at
> least 8 byte aligned.
> 
> - Integer types are all range checked.  i.e. if you try and pass a
> value > 127 as a :char parameter, it will raise an error.
> 
> - Add compat.h header to deal with ancient (i.e. < 1.8.6) versions of ruby
> 
> - Add missing :float and :double Struct member support (Patch from
> Andrea Fazzi <andrea.fazzi@alcacoop.it>)
> 
> - Reworked get_string and put_string to only handle NUL terminated ascii
> strings, and create get_bytes/put_bytes for binary data.
> 
> -  Per-module/library type definitions/aliases.
> 
> - Custom managment of Pointer & Struct lifecycle (from Mike Dalessio)
> 
> - Library handle caching (from Luc Heinrich <luc@honk-honk.com>)
>