Re: Status of 5.2 ports

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> writes:
>> > I don't think it is. Also alien has issues when compiled with MinGW I
>> > would consider to move to LuaFFI (modeled after luajit2 ffi api) [1].
>>
>> LuaFFI isn't portable though; is alien?
>
> What do you mean by portable?

What you (probably) think: can be compiled any system that Lua can.

> I thought it was impossible in ANSI C to write Lisp's apply--that is,
> call an arbitrary function with an arbitrary list of arguments. The
> signature must be known at compile-time.[1] Now that I think of it,
> ANSI C has no runtime type information anyway so it is impossible to
> even describe the argument list.

No doubt, but thus my question:  what does alien do?  Maybe it isn't
portable either, or maybe it is portable, but has less functionality
than LuaFFI.

This isn't necessarily a pointless question.  While it may be impossible
to completely support everything FFI does portably, maybe there are
useful subsets, or alternative interfaces, which _can_ be done portably
(or "sorta portably" -- making assumptions that aren't strictly true but
are defacto true in any existing ABI).  For instance, the sizes of C
types can be discovered by a C program.

Since many people seem to basically use FFI as an alternative to
stub-generators, maybe something halfway in between could be more
convenient, and yet still avoid machine-dependent code.

Anyway, I'm just tossing out ideas here...

-Miles

-- 
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