From: Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@...>
Date: 2008-12-11T02:30:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Standardizing FFI based wrappers

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 10:11 AM, Luc Heinrich <luc@honk-honk.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Back in november, when FFI 0.1.1 was released, there was a beginning of an
> interesting discussion about "standardizing" the way FFI based wrappers
> should be named, organized and packaged, in order to create a clean and
> useful (and hopefully growing) FFI "ecosystem"

I'm also interested in feedback. I'm working on an FFI wrapper for
ncurses. I haven't released a gem yet though the project is on github
if anyone's interested in work-in-progress:
http://github.com/seanohalpin/ffi-ncurses/tree/master. This is how I'm
planning to address the issues raised by Luc:

= Organisation

The gem will be called ffi-ncurses and will live in its own directory
rather than under ffi/ncurses.

I would like to call the module FFI::NCurses but would appreciate some
feedback as to whether people think this is a good idea. Would it be
polluting the FFI namespace?

= Packaging

No change here - thin wrapper only.

The only really tricky decision is what to do about macros. For
example, in ncurses there are macros to return the yx coordinates,
like this:

  #define getyx(win,y,x)   	(y = getcury(win), x = getcurx(win))

used like this:

  int x, y;
  getyx(win, y, x);

i.e. it directly updates the variables passed in. They are convenience
wrappers to obviate the fact that C cannot return multiple values.
I've translated them to work like this:

  y, x = getyx(win)

Not a literal translation, but certainly (IMHO) in the spirit of the
macro. (But as they say in Italian: traduttore, traditore :)

Again, any feedback here would be welcome.

= Naming

As mentioned above, I'm going to call the gem ffi-ncurses (and version
0.1.0 will be out real soon now).

= Other issues

- Do we want to distinguish operating system specific libraries, e.g.
ffi-win32-console, ffi-darwin-growl_plugin?

Regards,
Sean