Re: [Swig-user] Which FFI is easiest to implement?

[Nitro <ni...@dr...>]

Am 03.03.2008, 19:32 Uhr, schrieb Scott Gilbert <xs...@gm...>:

> I'm writing a "file calculator".  Not really a full blown language, but  
> it
> takes expressions on the command line.  Something like sed, but for  
> binary
> (numerical) files.  I thought it might be nice to allow users to easily
> extend it with new functions.

This sounds like a candidate for lua ( http://www.lua.org/about.html ).  
Lua is really tiny and embedding it is easy compared to bigger languages.  
The link above mentions that it consists of only 17,000 lines of code.  
Considering its size, it's a nice language.

> That sounds like a lot of work for the benefit, and I doubt SWIG would
> incorporate my mickey mouse language into its baseline, so my users would
> have to grab a non-standard version of swig to get things running.

This could indeed become a problem.

> I've seen plugin APIs (such as Netscape's plugin API) that pass a vtable  
> of
> function pointers into the DLL and therefore don't require linking  
> against
> the host library.  I know Python doesn't do this, but I wasn't sure about
> the others...

Ahh, I see. Sorry for my ignorance.

> I wouldn't call it a scripting language - just expressions on the command
> line.  It sounds like I'm looking in the wrong direction, but thanks for
> your reply!

I don't know how complex your expressions are. If lua doesn't fit the  
bill, maybe some very simple yacc/bison syntax or a very small handwritten  
parser would do?

-Matthias