Re: FFI again

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Mon 07 Oct 2013, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> So what I propose is to use "runtime loading of DSO" as a poor man's FFI
> where the DSL of the FFI is C and where the compilation of this "DSL" is
> handled by a C compiler.
>
> The only technical difference between what I propose and typical "runtime
> loading of DSOs" is that the system also handles running the C compiler,
> so you can download the TedZ-OpenPGP package from ELPA and install it
> (provided you have a C compiler on your machine).

This will work well enough for POSIX systems, but will fail miserably on
Windows systems. Most Windows users do not develpment tools installed,
and would have a hard time to find a C compiler producing binaries with
the correct ABI, and the other required build tools and dependencies.

Users should not have to deal with any of this in order to use libraries
that emacs uses via an FFI. They might just be able to deal with loading
a lisp package and adding a DLL to somewhere visible on the PATH, but
even that is too complicated for many (they expect installer programs to
do this work automatically).


    AndyM