Re: ANN: Alien 0.3

[Bradley Smith <gmane@...>]

Fabio Mascarenhas wrote:
> The first public release of Alien is available (it is 0.3 and not 0.1
> because I am counting design iterations :-) ).
>
> # What is Alien
>
> Alien is a Foreign Function Interface (FFI) for Lua. An FFI lets you
> call functions in dynamic libraries (.so, .dylib, .dll, etc.) from Lua
> code without having to write, compile and link a C binding from the
> library to Lua. In other words, it lets you write extensions that call
> out to native code using just Lua. It uses Bruno Haible's ffcall
> (http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-ffcall.html) behind the scenes.

It should be noted that use of alien requires acceptance of the GPL 
license. Although alien lists its license as the MIT license, the ffcall 
library is GPL licensed, which means alien is too.

Also, note that I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advise.

An alternative to ffcall is C/Invoke (http://www.nongnu.org/cinvoke/) 
which has a BSD license and preliminary Lua bindings.