Re: FFI in Emacs

[Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com>]

On Jul 11, 2012, at 12:11 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
>> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:14:56 +0900
>> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> [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.  libffi compiles out of the
> box with MinGW; I did that when I needed to build Guile on Windows,
> and my notes from that time indicate that the only libffi issue was a
> rather minor problem with "make install".  And there are precompiled
> Windows binaries available on the net.


It's wise to assume that code that hasn't been tried on Windows  
recently might need at least some porting, especially when it has  
anything to do with dynamic loading or calling conventions.  Despite  
all the things the NT hackers picked up from *nix, NT does many things  
rather differently, including what they call DLLs, and the APIs for  
loading them dynamically.  (Plus, it turns out libffi has nothing to  
do with loading; evidently, it only does calling.)