Re: FFI in Emacs

[joakim]

address@hidden writes:

> Glenn Morris <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> "John Wiegley" wrote:
>>
>>> So if we update Dave's patch, it can be committed toward 24.2?
>>>
>>>     http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/dynamic-loading/>
>> Obviously there are many factors that go in to answering that question.
>>
>> One to possibly bear in mind is that in recent years he no longer wants
>> to assign his copyright to the FSF (IIUC). I don't know if that has any
>> relevance to code previously written with the obvious intent of being in
>> Emacs, but never actually committed. I guess not (?).
>
> If no existing patch can be used, I can write one. (I have experience of
> libffi, etc)

I'm currently looking at making the xwidget branch support Gobject
Introspection(GIR), to a degree. This is not full FFI support, but it would
have several interesting consequences:

- Many more gtk widgets could be embedded in an emacs buffer(rather than
  the now hardcoded ones)

- A number of interesting non-visual gnome libraries support
  introspection

I think this would be nice and useful. GIR does use libffi under the
hood.

Anyway, that was just a heads up. Currently it's not going too well
because I find the GIR documentation to be not so lucid in some areas.

BTW a user reported success in running the xwidget branch on osx, with
an embedded webkit! This semi-shows that the approach is viable on
several plattforms.

-- 
Joakim Verona