[wxruby-development] Any investigation on using FFI instead of SWIG?

[Mark E.]

This may be a misguided message, but I was wondering if any thought has been
given to making wxRuby work using the new native FFI (Foreign Function
Interface) interface in the place of SWIG?

Something like the FFI thing would be much easier for a non-C programmer
like me to assist with.

If you aren't familiar with it (quite new) here are some links.
http://kenai.com/projects/ruby-ffi/pages/Home
http://blog.headius.com/2008/10/ffi-for-ruby-now-available.html
http://wmeissner.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-on-ruby-ffi.html
http://pluskid.lifegoo.com/?p=370

Now, I realize that FFI is really, really new and probably not yet ready to
handle something as complex as the needs of wxRuby. However, I wanted to
inquire as to the principle of it.

I have worked on other scripting engines before (windows platform in other
languages). I have experience with generating code to help map complex
structures in a native language to a simplified one in a scripted language.
I'm just curious as to what you guys think.

Ideally, I would love to see a shared library that wxRuby and wxPython could
both use to simplify complex structures that needed to be passed to the
scripts. Then each project would use something like FFI to import those
functions into Ruby or Python. Then the work could be shared. :)

Anyway, I'm interested in your thoughts, ideas and problem points.

-MarkE
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