[erlang-questions] What should go into the FFI chapter of the book

[Joe Armstrong]

Hi Joel,

Another fairly good example of interfacing can be found
at http://code.google.com/p/erlycairo/

Interfacing a canvas is somewhat easier than a full blown GUI system -
so might be useful
for illustrate purposes.

/Joe



On Dec 11, 2007 2:34 PM, Joel Reymont <joelr1@REDACTED> wrote:
> Serge,
>
> I agree with you on everything you wrote below. This is just the kind
> of feedback I love.
>
> I have also been told that there's work on WxWidgets as a linked-in
> driver.
>
> My focus is to both finish the book quickly and to keep it
> informative. This requires a compromise and I suspect that the book
> will not look like anything I envisioned in the beginning.
>
> It may well be that it's better to either describe the WxWidgets
> driver than to write a Cocoa bridge for the book. Describing existing
> code takes far less time than writing significant new code bases.
> WxWidgets is also cross-platform so Windows and Linux users of Erlang
> could run it, unlike the Cocoa bridge.
>
> In the end it may well suffice for me to just elaborate on what you
> listed below. There's more than enough content, complexity and value
> in doing this. I think I'll try to start down this path and see what
> happens.
>
>         Thanks, Joel
>
> On Dec 11, 2007, at 1:04 PM, Serge Aleynikov wrote:
>
> > I think it would be useful to cover link-in drivers from the
> > following perspective:
> >
> > 1. C types: ErlDrvData, ErlDrvBinary, ErlIOVec, etc. and how to
> > marshal terms to Erlang using these primitives.
> > 2. Taking advantage of driver queues.
> > 3. Monitoring health of Pids from C, and performing driver shutdown
> > or resource cleanup when a Pid dies.
> > 4. Highlighting differences between output methods (output, output2,
> > outputv).
> > 5. Handling events from other sources (driver_select, ready_input,
> > ready_output and event callbacks) in the driver.
> > 6. When to use ei and when not to.
> >
> > At least there is currently no in-depth illustrated coverage of
> > these subjects and one has to go through a broad trial-and-error
> > cycle (at least I know I did :-( ) that keeps the learning curve
> > pretty steep before he/she learns these concepts and the mysterious
> > veil of driver complexity dissolves.
> >
> > Serge
>
> --
> http://wagerlabs.com
>
>
>
>
>
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