[cffi-devel] More patches for ECL

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

Hi,

I had some time to work on the port of CFFI to ECL and I have attached
most of the fixes. They include

+ Fixed the port to architectures without dynamical FFI. (In these
ports CFFI foreign function calls only work when lisp code is
compiled)

+ ECL supplies its own version of RT hence this need not appear in the
ASDF cffi-test.

+ Tests with too large number of arguments (> 34) are marked as
expected to fail, since ECL's FFI does not support such function
calls.

I had to play a few tricks because CFFI does not allow us to include
headers function declarations and ECL cannot rely on the arguments to
FOREIGN-FUNCALL which are most of the time bogus. For instance,
:string is an alias to :pointer and when you call (foreign-funcall
"strlen" :string .. ) we cannot produce a proper C declaration to
strlen that does not collide with the one provided by the header
<string.h>.

So in the end I end up always using the routine dlsym() to discover
the functions and coerce them to a function pointer created with the
information given by CFFI. The outcome is therefore much less
efficient than what ECL can potentially do.

Regards

Juanjo
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