Re: Mike Pall's standalone FFI: a dream?

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 11/05/2011 14.46, steve donovan wrote:
> On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Lorenzo Donati
> <lorenzodonatibz@interfree.it>  wrote:
> > Well, I don't think sleeping a process for a given amount of time, or
> > detecting the title of the Windows of a running process or accessing
> > Window's registry can be defined "demanding". There are things that Lua
> > simply can't do without a C extension.
>
> Very true. By 'direct' I meant LuaJIT-style FFI, as opposed to a
> little extension for wrapping some common calls. I've used Alien for
> that sometimes; there have been a couple of attempts to do WinAPI
> bindings but no-one seems to agree on what 'everyone needs'. There's a
> lot of functions in that API !  POSIX is a model of simplicity in
> comparison. Although I'd say that a binding to the top one hundred
> useful functions would go most of the way for console tools: window
> and process management, enumerating resources, etc.

I heartily agree!
Funny that no smart programmer on this list has ever had such an itch to 
do any such binding. I wonder whether Lua is used so much on Windows. Or 
maybe everyone is happy with throwing in a couple of API calls specific 
for his/her project and be done with it.

Maybe lua-l could be used to do a survey of which are the "top 100 
WinAPI functions" for Windows Lua programmers. Maybe then someone could 
start working on such a binding with a clear goal.

As for POSIX, I know it very little (I have almost no programming 
experience on *NIX systems at system level). I read something lately and 
I was considering trying UWIN + luaposix to see if I can work with POSIX 
with Lua on Windows. But I have not an extreme urge to do so, especially 
because I cannot judge if it is too much work for too little gain. 
Judging only on version number (5.something) luaposix seems very mature 
and stable. BTW does someone actually use this combination? I would 
appreciate some comments before committing to a time-wasting exercise.

> Small GUI applications? Well, one of the things that can be done when
> LuaJIT gets callbacks is the ability to run native Windows GUI
> applications. It will be small and insanely fast compared to the big
> packages, at the cost of portability. But I suppose we no longer care
> about lean and mean that much anymore - unless in the embedded game,
> of course.
>
> The other way to get small self-contained GUI applications is to use
> the browser as the UI, i.e. use a dinky little local webserver.
>
> steve d.

Thanks for your interesting POVs and hints.

Cheers!
-- Lorenzo