[Pdx-pm] Designing a C library specifically for HLL binding

Eric Wilhelm enobacon at gmail.com
Thu Oct 30 13:07:37 PDT 2008


Hi all,

I'm working on adding .dwg support to VectorSection 
(http://vectorsection.org/), which will involve 
a lot of twiddly bitwise navigation, seeks, unpacks and such of the 
binary format.  It is also likely to hit a wall on speed rather quickly 
in Perl, but the code is also likely to be forced into looking like "C 
with dollar signs" because of the low-level nature of the task.

I'm thinking that perhaps the way to go is to implement small parts in 
C, probably involving Inline to hook them into the Perl code.

Keep in mind that I don't like C well enough to convince myself that 
I "know" it.  Or rather, I don't want to spend all of my development 
time dealing with memory allocation.  And just to keep things 
interesting, almost all of the data involved is going to be arrays and 
arrays of arrays.

I'm wondering if someone can give me some feedback on how this would 
work and/or point me at some examples or reading material.

My thought is that the C functions would all have one of the following 
signatures:

  bool gets_complex_data(source_struct, dest_struct);
  int  gets_simple_data(source_struct); 

Where 'source_struct' is a pointer to a struct which essentially 
contains just the filehandle and maybe a bit of positional data (the 
input is stateful.)  Then dest_struct is block allocated.  The HLL 
binding would then be doing all of the memory allocation (part of the 
plan being to minimize the memory footprint, but also to make 
a 'Perlish' API.)

I suppose this same scheme could be applied to a streaming processor in 
C.  As I'm currently imagining it, the XS for extracting a polygon 
would resemble:

  int i;
  int points;
  pointstruct a_point;
  points = get_polygon_point_count(input);
  for(i=0; i < points; i++) {
    if(get_polygon_point(input, i, a_point)) {
      // do something with a_point
    }
    else {
      // fail, retry, whatever
    }
  }

Where "do something" in this case is to create an AV and push it to 
the 'points' AV in the HV which gets returned.  Thus, the library only 
sets values in the pre-allocated temporary 'a_point' struct and the 
rest of the memory management happens within the Perl interpreter.  
Thus, the Perl code will be somewhat buffered from the fine-grained 
details of "$pts = number_of_points" and "foreach (0..$pts) {...}".

Now remember, I only know enough C to be dangerously amusing.  But, I 
have never heard of a C library being created specifically for binding 
to an HLL interpreter, so I might be lacking the vocabulary needed to 
clarify what I think I'm trying to do. Part of the goal here would be 
to allow it to be easily bound to various other interpreters - hence 
not simply a big XS library.

So, is this making any sense?  Seem like a reasonable approach?  Can 
anyone point me to a codebase which does something similar?  And 
possibly a Perl binding?

Thanks,
Eric
-- 
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a
desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
--E.B. White
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