[gdal-dev] FFI Interface (to Perl)

[Sean Gillies]

Ari,

This sounds great. I don't use Perl as much as I used to – unless you count
GNU Parallel, which I use about 320 hours a day – but I'll follow your
progress.

It seems to me that the idea of a common API across different scripting
languages isn't attractive to programmers like it once was. R and Node.js
interfaces for GDAL are being developed elsewhere, as are my Rasterio and
Fiona projects. As long as we're all attentive to the maintenance of the
core library the diversity is a good thing.

Shapely uses libffi to bind GEOS functions. The only reason I don't use
libffi (and Python's cffi module) for Rasterio and Fiona is that Cython
makes integration with Numpy so painless.


On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 5:14 PM, Kurt Schwehr <schwehr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Cool!  Should be useful for other languages to see what is possible with
> libffi
>
> On Dec 20, 2017 3:23 PM, "Ari Jolma" <ari.jolma at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> I've been experimenting with the Perl module FFI::Platypus, to create a
> Perl interface to GDAL with its help(1) and it's progressing well.
> FFI::Platypus itself uses libffi, which is a portable interface library.
> That, and Alien::gdal, which is a Perl module to use GDAL in a system that
> has Perl, allow some significant simplifications and streamlining for the
> Perl bindings.
>
> I can imagine those leading to the retirement of the Swig based Perl
> bindings at some point (like GDAL 3.0) and having only a single
> distribution of Perl GDAL bindings that does not live in GDAL source tree
> and is distributed through CPAN. In the meantime the Swig based bindings
> will live in GDAL source tree and a copy of that with a modified
> configuration system (that uses the Alien::gdal) in github(2) + CPAN.
>
> I don't think I'm aiming at 100% similar API with the FFI interface than
> Geo::GDAL since in the latter has accumulated some undesirable things over
> the years. Anybody interested in the new API is welcome to collaborate.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Ari
>
> (1) https://github.com/ajolma/Geo-GDAL-FFI
>
> (2) https://github.com/ajolma/Geo-GDAL-2.02
>
>
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-- 
Sean Gillies
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