C/XS Generator

plobsing has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all,

I have given myself the task of automatically generating some XS files. I caught myself starting to roll my own XS writer and asked myself: Are there any modules which would facilitate this?

I have seen Language::XS on CPAN which is half implemented and lacks some functionality I want (such as BOOT sections). Also I don't need the compiling and linking which it provides. All I am looking for is a handy way to write XS source code.

Is there anything that might help me?

Comment on C/XS Generator

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Re: C/XS Generator by randyk (Parson) on Jan 23, 2008 at 06:14 UTC
Take a look at ExtUtils::XSBuilder; the libapreq2 distribution uses this to generate the XS files.	[reply]
Re^2: C/XS Generator by plobsing (Friar) on Jan 23, 2008 at 07:00 UTC
Wow! I had actually overlooked that one because it looks like something that just parses C and builds XS like h2xs. I had no idea that it was so extensible. Thanks	[reply]
Re: C/XS Generator by sgt (Deacon) on Jan 23, 2008 at 20:43 UTC
Besides randyk 's answer, I wonder if some part of Inline and its translators InlineX::* (to XS) could be useful. cheers --stephan	[reply]
Re^2: C/XS Generator by plobsing (Friar) on Jan 24, 2008 at 00:09 UTC
That was the first place I looked. Actually, I am attempting to make an ILSM for Fortran. I've got a parser thats good enough (for now). The trick is in the glueing bit. Unlike most other Inline modules, which are interpreted, there's no runtime to which you can delegate method calling and reflection. I suspect thats why there are only 3 compiled ILSMs, one of which is a joke, and all of which are supported by people much wiser than I. You can't just delegate type conversion for interesting values, such as multi-dimensional arrays of structs, to the user like Inline::C does because that means they need access to the perlapi, but then I would need to rewrite many of the structs and create a ton of call-by-reference bridges. Also its a real pain to manipulate pointers in standard Fortran. That leaves my code writing the glue. I can write the glue for any particular case, but a generic automatic solution is a little tougher especially if you want to support the features of Fortran that C does not have (which is half the point).	[reply]
Re^3: C/XS Generator by sgt (Deacon) on Jan 24, 2008 at 09:15 UTC
Anything useful from the PDL camp? cheers --stephan	[reply]
Re^4: C/XS Generator by plobsing (Friar) on Jan 25, 2008 at 01:47 UTC