Re: Automated Win32 bindings with Alien?

[Pierre LeMoine <yarr.luben@...>]

2009/12/30 Fabio Mascarenhas <mascarenhas@acm.org>:
> 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
>

Since we are discussing Alien and Python here, i thought i'd ask for
a feature: i noticed a friend using a ffi interface in python, which
automatically detected if one sent to many/to few parameters somehow,
unlike Alien which crashes (at least for me) in such cases.
/Pierre