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? 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). So I really do appeal to people to help me put the effort in here. I can't justify working on the FFI on ARM or PPC in my Cadence Newspeak gig; we're entirely on x86. I /can/ work on the threaded FFI as we need it at Cadence, just as many other people need it. 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. 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