Re: Implementing loadlibrary function in Octave

[Reza Housseini]

I've found the library which I plan to use for the foreign function interface. I'ts called ffcall [1] and seems to support a cleaner interface than libffi.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/libffcall/

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 9:18 PM, Reza Housseini <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 7:16 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

On 11/17/2013 12:49 PM, PrasannaKumar Muralidharan wrote:

Hi All,

Looks like loading a C library from Octave using loadlibrary is not
supported yet. I would like to spend some time and try to implement
loadlibrary and related functions. Not sure how the outcome will be as
I am new to Octave code. Will it be useful to the Octave community if
it is implemented? If it will be useful I can work on it. I will also
communicate with the community about the progress, doubts etc
frequently.

My idea is to start doing small contribution and then move on to
implement bigger features. If this feature is going to be big for a
newbie then I will try to find some other small stuff that I can
implement.

We had some discussions about this in the last year.  Search the maintainers list archive for messages with the subject lines

  Functions from Matlab C shared library utility

and

  Implementation of libpointer

In July, August, and September.

You should check with the person who started those threads to see what
progres has been made.

As I recall, one problem is that implementing these functions in a way
that is compatible with Matlab requires classdef-style classes and we
don't really have that in Octave yet.

jwe

Hi PrassanaKumar

I started once an effort to bring this functions alive. But I didn't found time yet to finish it. One big problem is, as John mentioned, the implementation within the classdef branch. I have no experience with the classdef and need first to dive into this (as far as I known there's also not a lot of documentation about this). I wanted to start with the libpointer because it seems the most obvious to do. The rest is straight forward, except of the header parsing, but which can be done with llvm or doxygen. My recent effort can be found here [1] (not a lot to see here). Of course you can gladly join to the project, I wanted to use the libltdl [2] library which is working on windows and unix systems. There was a dscussion to use libffi [3], but I found another library which I can't recall at the moment which fits our needs better. At all I think we shouls use orient at the ctypes [4] module form python.

Cheers Reza

[1] https://bitbucket.org/rezahousseini/octave-shared-lib-utilities

[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html#Using-libltdl

[3] http://sourceware.org/libffi/

[4] http://python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/reference.html