Depressing
January 30, 2007
I recently ventured into the Lisp community with a trivial wrapping of a library called FreeImage. I used CFFI for this and was quite pleased– well, except for one thing. That thing would be that I had to specially build the library to not use stdcall. CFFI does not support stdcall, yet (if ever). I generally prefer being able to build libraries without changing the source for a single language. So, I could just post instructions on what is needed to be done to the FreeImage sourcecode and let the user still get the source from the FreeImage web-site or I could always do a build and post it with trivial-freeimage. I have even thought about asking the developers of FreeImage if they would except a patch that would allow a user to use a define of LISP or some such thing to build especially for cffi. I would rather do none of the above. I suppose I will need to create a backend for each Lisp I wish to support– using their respective ffi– and then maybe have a front-end that hides it all away from the end-user of trivial-freeimage. That is rather disappointing as I very much like cffi. I wish cffi had support for stdcall and cdecl like ctypes in python (just found that out today from a co-worker who thought my situation was amusing and wanted to show off ctypes).
update:
The cffi developers are looking into adding support for stdcall. I have offered to help in anyway that I can. I am looking at the source of cffi to try and grok it. I did not mean to come across as one of words and not action. I also did not mean to come across as not appreciating cffi as I do appreciate it very much. CFFI does not have a donate paypal option but if they will institute one I will donate to help out since it will be unlikely I will be up to speed on the source before they finish adding stdcall.
Anarres 