Re: FFI in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com>,
>     johnw@newartisans.com,
>     monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
>     emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 03:23:46 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > > >> [SXEmacs FFI interface] should be fairly easily portable to Emacs on
>  > > >> platforms that have libffi.  It probably doesn't work on Windows
>  > > >
>  > > > Why not?  Not because of libffi, I think.
> 
> Because there is no support for Windows in SXEmacs at all, and last I
> looked XEmacsen do not use the same technology for loading DLLs on
> Windows that they do on Unix, so there is no provision whatsoever in
> the SXEmacs code for actually loading the C code that the Lisp FFI API
> allows you to call.

Well, if they don't use libltdl or something similar for loading
(which is a natural choice when using libffi, but YMMV), then I guess
you are right, it might not work.

> Come to think of it, I am assuming a "native" build with VC; maybe it
> would work with the "Unix" code on Cygwin/Mingwin.

MinGW uses the same APIs as VC, so I doubt that.  Cygwin is another
matter, of course.