TalkFFI: automatic FFI generation for Pharo

Happy new year everybody!

I am pleased to announce today the initial release of TalkFFI.

TalkFFI enables automatic FFI generation for Smalltalk.
It uses libclang to parse unmodified C header files and generate FFI bindings to c libraries.
For now it supports the generation of NativeBoost FFI bindings.

The project is released under MIT license, and you can find it on the smalltalkhub site.
http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~CipT/TalkFFI

Please do not hesitate send me your comments/critics/ideas.

That's super awesome. Thanks!!

Hi guys, 

Thanks Ciprian. It is a nice extension :).
we should write a little tutorial :)

Stef

--
Dr. Ciprian TEODOROV
Ingénieur Développement CAO

tél : 06 08 54 73 48
mail : [hidden email]
www.teodorov.ro

>
> Yes a tutorial will come too ... but first I want to test it a little more, and maybe get some feedback from volunteers ;)

excellent!
For the video, may be use larger fonts.

Wow.. that's great.
Having a way to automatically generate bindings makes life much easier :)

Few questions:
 - did you tried to run it against some libraries around there, except
from LLVM?

- i saw, in video, you can customize generation a bit.. to what
extent? Is there interface
(suppose i want to use own naming prefix, suppress generation of
certain declaration etc)?

--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.

hi Igor,

Yes I have tried some little external libraries, nothing big yet (besides llvm, and libclang). For the moment I did not see any show-stopper problems... But there are still some rough edges. What I have under scrutiny right now are:
- adding unions to NB
- supporting vectors (and constant arrays, which are flattened right now). Vectors appear to be used in cblas.
- there are some problems with my callback naming scheme, which I found trying to map Cairo.

Besides these there are some improvements to NB, to simplify code generation and maintenance like:
- an unified parser for the simplified c declarations.
- unifying fieldDecl, enumDecl, fnSpec under a single naming convention... Maybe nativeSpec, or nativeDecl

For the customizations I think right now is to early to say that I have a good interface. But certainly over time we will have different filters. Right now you can customize fct names using a block, and u can specify a prefix for the generated classes.

I am also thinking about a graphical interface, somewhat on the lines of the dllcc in vw.

Anyways I think using libclang offers nice opportunities, maybe retrieving comments from headers, or even autocomplete-like ffi generation...

So yeah for now I will call TalkFFI a tech-preview... We will see how it goes ;)

Cheers

On Jan 7, 2013 1:13 AM, "Igor Stasenko" <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Wow.. that's great.
> Having a way to automatically generate bindings makes life much easier :)
>
> Few questions:
>  - did you tried to run it against some libraries around there, except
> from LLVM?
>
> - i saw, in video, you can customize generation a bit.. to what
> extent? Is there interface
> (suppose i want to use own naming prefix, suppress generation of
> certain declaration etc)?
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Igor Stasenko.
>

On 7 January 2013 12:38, Ciprian Teodorov <[hidden email]> wrote:
Feel free to discuss the details.
Getting NB more feature-complete won't hurt anyone :)

Yes, we should start from somewhere,  and it looks like a good starting point.
About customizations, i was thinking about SWIG-style customization
where you can write-down a list of rules, how you would like to
generate bindings to some concrete library + target language etc.

Since depending on the library, you will need some adjustments here or
there, you will find that we're
need that inevitably.




--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko.

Hey!

On 01/06/2013 05:22 PM, Ciprian Teodorov wrote:
> Happy new year everybody!
>
> I am pleased to announce today the initial release of TalkFFI.

Wow! I have been waiting for something "SWIG" like for Squeak/Pharo
since... hell, I dunno, since like ever. ;)

This kind of stuff might very well be the most important "piece" of the
puzzle when it comes to *really* growing Pharo outside of the general
Smalltalk community.

regards, Göran

> On 01/06/2013 05:22 PM, Ciprian Teodorov wrote:
>> Happy new year everybody!
>>
>> I am pleased to announce today the initial release of TalkFFI.
>
> Wow! I have been waiting for something "SWIG" like for Squeak/Pharo since... hell, I dunno, since like ever. ;)
>
> This kind of stuff might very well be the most important "piece" of the puzzle when it comes to *really* growing Pharo outside of the general Smalltalk community.

yes!
:)
Let us escape the image :)

Happy new year everybody!

I am pleased to announce today the initial release of TalkFFI.

TalkFFI enables automatic FFI generation for Smalltalk.
It uses libclang to parse unmodified C header files and generate FFI bindings to c libraries.
For now it supports the generation of NativeBoost FFI bindings.

The project is released under MIT license, and you can find it on the smalltalkhub site.
http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~CipT/TalkFFI

Please do not hesitate send me your comments/critics/ideas.

Best regards,
--
Dr. Ciprian TEODOROV
Ingénieur Développement CAO

tél : 06 08 54 73 48
mail : [hidden email]
www.teodorov.ro

On 01/08/2013 06:26 PM, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto wrote:
> Repository refuses connection.

Works for me. Both anon or with my SH credentials.

regards, Göran

Hey!

Got it installed in a Pharo 2.0 image etc. I am on Ubuntu 12.10 64. You
wrote I need libclang.so for 32 bits? And version 3.1 specifically?

Also, is there a "sanity test" I can run? That verifies libclang + NB etc.

I want to try this on a quite simple little C lib.

regards, Göran

Hi Ciprian:

On 06 Jan 2013, at 17:22, Ciprian Teodorov wrote:
> The project is released under MIT license, and you can find it on the smalltalkhub site.
> http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~CipT/TalkFFI

I was trying to play with TalkFFI, but it looks like libclang3.1 is not compiled correctly or something.

How do you build it? In your code I see you are also targeting OSX, so that doesn't seem to be the problem.

I was trying to use the MacPorts version of libclang3.1 without having set any special compiler flags.
So, I am not entirely sure whether it is build correctly.

Any hints are appreciate.

Thanks
Stefan


--
Stefan Marr
Software Languages Lab
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr
Phone: +32 2 629 2974
Fax:   +32 2 629 3525

Hi:

On 23 Jan 2013, at 15:28, Stefan Marr wrote:

I searched a bit more and found the libclang of Xcode (/Developer/usr/clang-ide/lib/libclang.dylib).

With that lib it crashes the VM on a callout to parse the header file (clang_createTranslationUnitFromSourceFile).
The MacPorts version already stopped way earlier when trying to use clang_createIndex.

So, still not a lot of luck.

I am on a OSX 10.6 with the latest NBCog, downloaded today (http://pharo.gforge.inria.fr/ci/vm/nbcog/mac/NBCog-mac-latest.zip)

Best regards
Stefan

--
Stefan Marr
Software Languages Lab
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr
Phone: +32 2 629 2974
Fax:   +32 2 629 3525

--
Mariano
http://marianopeck.wordpress.com

Hi Mariano:

On 23 Jan 2013, at 16:59, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:

> Maybe the lib needs to be 32 bits? can you check if the lib you are trying is compiled for 32 or 64?

Yes, it needs to be 32bit, but that's not the problem:

smarr@minerva ~/tmp/libgit/libgit2$ file /Developer/usr/clang-ide/lib/libclang.dylib
/Developer/usr/clang-ide/lib/libclang.dylib: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Developer/usr/clang-ide/lib/libclang.dylib (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64
/Developer/usr/clang-ide/lib/libclang.dylib (for architecture i386): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library i386

smarr@minerva ~/tmp/libgit/libgit2$ file /opt/local/libexec/llvm-3.1/lib/libclang.dylib
/opt/local/libexec/llvm-3.1/lib/libclang.dylib: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/opt/local/libexec/llvm-3.1/lib/libclang.dylib (for architecture i386): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library i386
/opt/local/libexec/llvm-3.1/lib/libclang.dylib (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64

Both version I have are universal binaries.

Best regards
Stefan


--
Stefan Marr
Software Languages Lab
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr
Phone: +32 2 629 2974
Fax:   +32 2 629 3525

The libs should be 32 bits... but it seems it is not this the issue...