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ethan (3163)
reversethis-{ed. ... rap.nov.olissat}
Being a 25-year old chap living in the western-most town of Germany. Stuying communication and information science and being a huge fan of XS-related things.
Ingenious XS
Now that the portability issues of the mplib have been passed to its author who promised to look into that, I can take a little break from that.
Instead I have indeed started with the AA-lib port to XS. It's a most satisfying work now that I have finally grokked how typemaps work. With the help of these a C-lib basically transforms very nicely into an object-oriented Perl lib. A method that sets a pixel in the output is not more than a finger-snip:
void
pixel (self, x, y, color)
aa_context *self;
int x;
int y;
int color;
CODE:
aa_putpixel(self, x, y, color);
Called like $aa->pixel(1, 1, $color) and it's done.
And here's the occasional rant: Why don't the XS-docs describe a very easy thing in an easy manner? Till yesterday I thought the typemap would have to translate a C-structure into the equivalent blessed Perl-hash and vice versa. Naturally, with this misconception in mind it's hard to understand the rest of perlxs.pod.
I finally found it out with the help of Dean Roehrich's CookBookA that he has released on CPAN. Mind you, this one doesn't exactly have nice explanations either. It was one sentence that dawned a light on me:
Ex1 demonstrates how to write a Perl constructor in C.
The constructor allocates a C structure and creates an
opaque Perl object to hold an address to the structure.
'hold an address to the structure': That's the sub-sentence that explained Life, the Universe and Everything.
an endless discussion thread about what features to include.
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
perlxstut ? (Score:2)
Re:perlxstut ? (Score:1)
It seems to have one more example. Incidentally it's one dealing with filehandles which is what I will need very soon. That's certainly an improvement!
But the Typemap section is still too thin. It still does not mention the special symbols $var, $arg and $type. I'd love to be able to say
perldoc perltypemapand get a concise description of what a typemap file is really fRe:perlxstut ? (Score:2)
Re:perlxstut ? (Score:1)
It was only yesterday that I had my first succesful use of a typemap (which was actually copied from Dean Roehrich). A little too thin yet for supplying documentation.
But I am not at all lazy when it comes to Perl and I'll be the first one to write such a beast if I feel ready. I expect to gain some familiarity with all that soon. Also, when looking at the typemaps available I see a slightly different subset of m
Re:perlxstut ? (Score:1)
Richard Clamp is working on an XS tutorial. The current draft is available here [unixbeard.net]. I believe patches to it are welcome.