From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Mon Dec 16 10:41:59 2002
Subject: Re: foreign function interface
From: Andy Adler <adler at site dot uottawa dot ca>
To: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
cc: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2002 11:40:02 -0500 (EST)

This is a great idea.

The best similar concept I'm aware of is Perl's Win32::API.
It is used like this:
    use Win32::API;
    $GetPID = new Win32::API("kernel32", "GetCurrentProcessId", '', 'N');
    $PID = $GetPID->Call();

This allows direct access to windows dll's.
The only tricky part is packing data into the appropriate
structs for each dll to use.

In order to offer a similar function from octave, we would
need something like perl's "pack" function.

I was thinking (for other reasons) that a we need a "sread"
and "swrite" analgous to "fread" and "fwrite".

These functions would read and write to a string (or other
byte data vector) rather than to a file.


Andy


On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Paul Kienzle wrote:

> Hi, all.
>
> I've been trying to think of ways to lower the barrier for contributions to
> octave. In particular, there are a lot of prefectly good libraries out there
> that people could call if it were easy to call them. While oct-file
> programming is much easier than mex-file programming, I believe we can do
> even better than that.  I would like for us to be able to directly call
> sharable object code from a script without writing a DEFUN_DLD wrapper.
>
> The technique is called variously a foreign function interface or a native
> call interface.  Given a native type signature (e.g., double sin(double)) we
> should be able to have a definition ffi("libm","sin","dd","Nsin") which
> defines the octave function Nsin, which you could then call from octave as x
> = Nsin(y).  For extra convenience it would be nice to automatically apply
> scalar functions like this element-wise on a vector.  Functions like sqrt
> would be a problem, but these could be handled easily enough from a script
> such as: function x=sqrt(y), x = Nsqrt(abs(y)); x(y<0) *= 1i; end
>
> There are three approaches that I've encountered for doing this:
>
> (1) fortran style:  everything must be a pointer.  This is less than ideal
> since a lot of functions don't operate on pointers, so users would have to
> wrap the library functions with functions that accept pointers.  This is
> still easier than figuring out how to use the octave_value properly.  R
> seems to do this.
>
> (2) predefined type signatures: predefine functions for all the possible
> type signatures that you might want to call.  In principle you could write
> special functions for each possible type signature.  E.g., ffi(...,"dd",...)
> would call a function like dd_chain(double (*f)(double),octave_value &ov)
> which internally would be defined like:
> octave_value dd_chain(double (*f)(double), octave_value &ov)
>     Matrix in(ov.matrix_value());
>     Matrix out(ov.rows(),ov.columns());
>     const double *pin = in.data();
>     double *pout = out.fortran_vec();
>     for (int i=0; i < in.length(); i++) { pout[i] = (*f)(pin[i]); }
>     return octave_value(out);
> The problem with this approach is that the various combinations of
> void/character/integer/float/double/complex, and pointers thereto leads to a
> small
> explosion in the number of functions.  I believe Perl does this with its
> native call interface (or it will in Perl6 whenever that is released.)
>
> (3) compiler-like call.  Build a stackframe, jump to the function and await
> the return.  This is the ideal way since it is not limited in terms of the
> number or type of paramters, but it is very machine dependent.  libffi
> provides this for a number of platforms.
>
> Does anyone have experience in this sort of thing? Does it sound like a
> worthwhile venture?
>
> Paul Kienzle
> pkienzle at users dot sf dot net
>
>