Laurent Sansonetti
lsans****@apple*****
Wed Sep 13 03:36:32 JST 2006
Hi guys, As you could see, I recently experimented the libffi library inside RubyCocoa. I did that in a branch named "libffi-experiment" in the SVN repository. I also experimented a new metadata XML mechanism. Here are the major changes in that branch: - libffi sources are included in misc/libffi, and built if libffi is not present in the system - no more rb_[AppKit|Foundation].c code generation - at build time, framework/tool/generate_bridge_support.rb parse AppKit/Foundation headers and generate XML description for constants, functions, enumerations... - at runtime, RubyCocoa parses the XML files and do the necessary linkage - constants are loaded lazily (via OSX.const_missing), to avoid localizing all symbols at once (which is costly) - libffi is used to call C functions from Ruby - libffi is used to forward messages from Ruby to ObjC - the XML description also contains the list of ObjC methods returning BOOL, so that we can automatically convert their return value to real Ruby boolean objects (so, not necessary to suffix with ? anymore to have a bool value) Most tests are passing (and all the samples I tested are working). The only stuff that is broken is the pass-by-reference support, which is normal. I'm right now working on describing structures inside the XML (for example, in case of Foundation, NSRect and friends), so that everything can be handled dynamically. Please test the branch if you can, and report me any feedback. If it's OK for everyone I would propose to merge it to trunk once everything is complete. Thanks, Laurent
