> I've been recently working a lot with .NET, and found
> http://www.pinvoke.net/ to be very usefull.
> This web site is providing the .NET world equivalent to FFI for win32 calls.
> Wouldn't it be very nice to have such a wiki for FFIs ?
Yeah, I think there are several features of pinvoke.net that could/should be replicated in a Lisp FFI wiki:
- entries for
- data structures and immediate types
- function signatures
- consistent structure across each entry
- summary
- complete FFI definition that you can copy&paste
- perhaps for just CFFI?
- usage notes or gotchas
- example code
- alternatives, if any, for the current entry
- pointer to relevant doc in the native library (e.g., ImageMagick manual, Gtk+ manual, MSDN, etc)
- FAQ
- pros and cons of the various FFIs
- address SWIG, Verrazano, and other automation tools
- search
- a search engine that has a decent syntax and the ability to constrain the search to specific areas (e.g., Google's group: modifier)
One other crazy thought I had about this is if the wiki was organized via tags a la del.icio.us rather than (or in addition to) a hierarchy. I’d bet that would be especially handy for folks implementing portability layers. E.g., you could search on the combination of “window” and “creation” tags to see FFI definitions for window creation functions in the various UI libraries.