[Ecls-list] updating refererence pointers in UFFI

[Goffioul Michael]

As already answered, you can achieve that by allocating foreign objects
yourself in LISP and passing them as argument to your C function. For
instance, when allocating a foreign object of type :int in ECL, it would
be passed as int* to a C function.

However, it would be much easier if ECL could do it automatically. I'm
thinking about CLISP here, where you can tag FFI arguments as in, out
or in-out. All out/in-out arguments are returned as secondary values of
the FFI function. out-only arguments does not need to be specified as
input arguments. This might me complicated to implement, but this would
ease the work of the user.

For example, something like:

(ffi:def-function ("f1" f1)
  ((a :int) 		;; default to :in
   (b :int :out)
   (c :int :in-out))
  :returning :int)

(f1 1 2)
=> 1 maps to 'a', 2 maps to 'c'
=> returns 3 values: function result, b and c

What do you think?

Michael.

> I may have asked his ages ago but can't seem to find any record of it.
> 
> I should probably post this on some UFFI mail list if I can 
> find one aswell, but any ideas with ECL.
> 
> I am using UFFI to call our DLL (written in C) functions and 
> most of it works ok.
> I can pass cstrings ok as in cl_init().
> 
> But other functions such as cl_elementGetAttachment() creates 
> C strings and return them by assigning them to dereferenced 
> argument pointers.
> Also pointers to longs are dereferenced.
> Eg. for the "attachment" argument, in C we pass the address 
> of a C string pointer. This get updated with the newly 
> allocated C string pointer.
> 
> So is there any way to pass the C-function via UFFI a C 
> pointer arg of somekind and have it updated when returning to Lisp ??
> It doesn't seem to fit in with the Lisp way of doing things, 
> but is this possible in any way ?
> 
> I am not compiling any of this in Windows. Its just pure interpretive.
> 
> long cl_init(const char *configFileName);
> 
> ((ffi:def-function ("cl_init" init)
>   ((configFileName :cstring ))
>   :returning :long
> )
> 
> 
> long cl_elementGetAttachment(long hDoc, unsigned int index, 
> char **name, char **attachment, unsigned long 
> *attachmentSize, bool detach);
> 
> ((ffi:def-function ("cl_elementgetattachment" element-get-attachment)
>                   ((hdoc :long) (index :unsigned-short) (name
> :pointer-void)
>                    (attachment :pointer-void) (attachmentsize
> :pointer-void)
>                    (detach :unsigned-char))
>                   :returning
>                   :long
>                   :module
>                   :default))
> 
> Cheers
> deano
> 
> 
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