On Fri, 22 Jul 2011, Eliot Miranda wrote:
But getting the FFI working on ARM and/or PPC is more effective than writing yet another plugin, no? Â We can always add security to the FFI (essentially some way of disabling internal calls within the FFI plugin, e.g. based on cryptographic keys to enable it, or whatever). Â So I really do appeal to people to help me put the effort in here. Â I can't justify working on the FFI on ARM or PPC in my Cadence Newspeak gig; we're entirely on x86. Â I /can/ work on the threaded FFI as we need it at Cadence, just as many other people need it. Â But for me to move the threaded FFI ahead it needs to be on all platforms and that means I need help on the platforms I can't justify working on.
So folks, please give serious consideration to putting effort into something that may be a little harder at first but will yield major benefits slightly later. Â Let's defer gratification :)
QEMU can be used for emulating various CPUs, so if you don't have an ARM, PPC or SPARC hardware, you can still develop/test FFI with it. Threaded FFI is great, it opens new possibilities, but nowadays the feature I miss the most is the ability to call functions in 64-bit (x86_64) libraries (from a 32-bit VM/image). Levente