Re: Automated Win32 bindings with Alien?

[Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@...>]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Jerome Vuarand
<jerome.vuarand@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/12/30 steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>:
>> A question for Fabio: what are the issues with Alien for 64-bit Windows?
>
> I can answer part of that. Libffi [1] (the C library on top of which
> Alien is built) has no support for 64-bit windows. More specifically
> there is a need for some runtime generated glue code (mainly for
> callbacks), and assembler support for x64 is very poor so far (many
> Visual C++ compilers come without assembler and/or lack support for
> inline asm).
>
> Python and Java (in the JNA package) have their own port of libffi
> specifically for x64. However I never managed to compile any of these
> two for Alien (usually because of the lack of assembler).
>
> I tried all this about a year ago, so things may have changed since then.
>
> [1] http://sourceware.org/libffi/
>

Actually Alien uses the Python ctypes version of libffi (it is under
the libffi/win32 in the Alien sources). They provide a translation
from GNU assembler syntax to MSVC inline ASM, and put it in win32.c.
But you are correct, looking at the sources it only seems to support
Win32 on x86... I will look for a newer version (I took this from
ctypes about one and a half years ago).

--
Fabio Mascarenhas