Re: Implementing loadlibrary, calllib, etc.

[John W. Eaton]

On 24-Mar-2010, John Swensen wrote:

| I took a look at swig and it looks like extracting the necessary
| bits from swig might be work work than it is worth.

I admit to not having looked at the swig internals.  I just assumed
that it had some way of parsing header files to gather information
about interfaces.  It is unfortunate but understandable if it is not
modular enough to extract and reuse that part of the code.

| On the other
| hand, maybe we should just use swig altogether and then wrap all the
| specifics of loadlibrary, callib, etc. around swig.

Does ffcall work by invoking a compiler or by using some other tricks?
If it avoids needing to call a compiler, then I think you want to use
ffcall rather than swig, which I believe would force you to generate
some glue code, compile it, then load the resulting shared library (as
a .oct file) to access the library.  That sounds like it could be a
lot slower than ffcall if ffcall simply loads the library and uses
some magic to call functions directly.

| JWE, I will definitely take baby steps and post progress to the
| mailing list.  I was originally planning to make this and
| OctaveForge package, but your comment made me wonder if you thought
| it should go in the core of Octave?

I think it is a core feature.  You can start with an Octave Forge
package if you like, but that is likely to make merging with Octave
more difficult later.

jwe