[cffi-devel] calling a function of the same name from two DLLs

[Jack Unrue]

On 12/19/06, Luís Oliveira <luismbo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've added this to the TODO list. I've also thought a little about how
> to support this best, API-wise. Besides the obvious :LIBRARY (or some
> other name) to DEFCFUN and friends it'd be nice if CFFI could infer
> the "current library" somehow. An IN-FOREIGN-LIBRARY macro for
> instance, though that might break when doing incremental development
> with SLIME for instance.

Yeah, I see what you're getting at. Otherwise, I guess one has to encode
context into the Lisp name of each function, sort of like I did in my
DllGetVersion example.

> DEFINE-FOREIGN-LIBRARY could record the library name's symbol-package
> and then DEFCFUN could look at *PACKAGE* to figure out which DLL to
> use. That might be a silly idea.

I don't know about silly :-) but I would vote against that option if it were
to be the only solution. Even though I can imagine use-cases where that
might be reasonable, it's not a natural thing to do. C++ programmers are
not required to declare a new namespace for each DLL that they use,
for example.

> This kind of mechanism (either this last one, or an IN-FOREIGN-LIBRARY, or
> something else) would  also be useful for library-wide settings such
> as stdcall vs. cdecl. That's actually the context in which I had
> thought about this.
>
> I'm sure this kind of problem has been dealt with before in other
> libraries (IIRC, five-am has an IN-SUITE macro). Any ideas?

I've only got real experience implementing one library in CL, so
I can't help there.

> P.S. -- Sorry Jack, for the duplicate message.

No problem :-)

-- 
Jack Unrue