Ironruby core - Aug 2010 - IronRuby FFI

I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing it
for two reasons:
1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d like to
investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
bridge.
2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.

Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure that''s
the right
starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure if those
are
the right directions, something else, or what.

Thanks,

Ryan Riley

Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
Twitter: @panesofglass
Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
Website: http://panesofglass.org/
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Ryan,

I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t know
mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my
infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could
focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.

I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you be
interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach of
essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.

-Charles


On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing
> it for two reasons:
> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to
> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
> bridge.
> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.
>
> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
> I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure if
those are
> the right directions, something else, or what.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan Riley
>
> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
> Twitter: @panesofglass
> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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Couldn''t this be implemented via P/Invoke? Would P/Invoke work without
the
attributes required in C#?

--
Will Green
http://hotgazpacho.org/


On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Charles Strahan <
charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan,
>
> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t
> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my
> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could
> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.
>
> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you
be
> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach
of
> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
>
> -Charles
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
>
>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing
>> it for two reasons:
>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to
>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
>> bridge.
>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about
FFI.
>>
>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed,
>> so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
>> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
>> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure
if those are
>> the right directions, something else, or what.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ryan Riley
>>
>> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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That''s something I''m curious about too. I don''t know
whether or not P/Invoke
alone can match the functionality of libffi. I''d have to look through
some
of libffi and see if there''s anything can''t be accomplished in
C#.

If everything can be accomplished in C#, I''d go that route. We could
emit
types at runtime that have the necessary DLLImport attributes and such
(something I''ve already done for little projects of mine).

-Charles

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Will Green <will at hotgazpacho.org>
wrote:
> Couldn''t this be implemented via P/Invoke? Would P/Invoke work
without the
> attributes required in C#?
>
> --
> Will Green
> http://hotgazpacho.org/
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Charles Strahan <
> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Ryan,
>>
>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for
inspiration (didn''t
>> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In
my
>> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
>> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I
could
>> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of
that.
>>
>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would
you be
>> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the
approach of
>> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib
around that.
>>
>> -Charles
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
>>
>>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but
I''m interested in doing
>>> it for two reasons:
>>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and
we''d like to
>>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our
current
>>> bridge.
>>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about
FFI.
>>>
>>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed,
>>> so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
>>> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get
started? I''ve
>>> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not
sure if those are
>>> the right directions, something else, or what.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Ryan Riley
>>>
>>> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>>> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>>> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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I would also recommend to look at Python''s c-types and especially
IronPython''s implementation:

http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/tree/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/

Many of the features might be similar to Ruby''s FFI and it would be
good to share the implementation with IronPython when possible.

Tomas

From: ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org [mailto:ironruby-core-bounces at
rubyforge.org] On Behalf Of Charles Strahan
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 2:35 PM
To: ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
Subject: Re: [Ironruby-core] IronRuby FFI

That''s something I''m curious about too. I don''t know
whether or not P/Invoke alone can match the functionality of libffi.
I''d have to look through some of libffi and see if there''s
anything can''t be accomplished in C#.

If everything can be accomplished in C#, I''d go that route. We could
emit types at runtime that have the necessary DLLImport attributes and such
(something I''ve already done for little projects of mine).

-Charles
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Will Green <will at
hotgazpacho.org<mailto:will at hotgazpacho.org>> wrote:
Couldn''t this be implemented via P/Invoke? Would P/Invoke work without
the attributes required in C#?

--
Will Green
http://hotgazpacho.org/

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com<mailto:charles.c.strahan at gmail.com>> wrote:
Ryan,

I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In
fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could focus
on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.

I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you be
interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach of
essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.

-Charles

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org<mailto:ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>> wrote:
I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing it for two reasons:
1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d like to
investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current bridge.
2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.

Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so I
think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure that''s
the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not
sure if those are the right directions, something else, or what.

Thanks,

Ryan Riley

Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org<mailto:ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
Twitter: @panesofglass
Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
Website: http://panesofglass.org/
_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org<mailto:Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core


_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org<mailto:Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core


_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org<mailto:Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core

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I''ll have to take a look at that. If it''s cross platform, it
could be a
great resource.

-Charles

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Tomas Matousek <
Tomas.Matousek at microsoft.com> wrote:
>  I would also recommend to look at Python?s c-types and especially
> IronPython?s implementation:
>
>
>
>
>
http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/tree/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/
>
>
>
> Many of the features might be similar to Ruby?s FFI and it would be good to
> share the implementation with IronPython when possible.
>
>
>
> Tomas
>
>
>
> *From:* ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org [mailto:
> ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org] *On Behalf Of *Charles Strahan
> *Sent:* Friday, August 20, 2010 2:35 PM
> *To:* ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Ironruby-core] IronRuby FFI
>
>
>
> That''s something I''m curious about too. I don''t
know whether or not
> P/Invoke alone can match the functionality of libffi. I''d have to
look
> through some of libffi and see if there''s anything can''t
be accomplished in
> C#.
>
> If everything can be accomplished in C#, I''d go that route. We
could emit
> types at runtime that have the necessary DLLImport attributes and such
> (something I''ve already done for little projects of mine).
>
> -Charles
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:14 PM, Will Green <will at hotgazpacho.org>
wrote:
>
> Couldn''t this be implemented via P/Invoke? Would P/Invoke work
without the
> attributes required in C#?
>
>
>
> --
> Will Green
> http://hotgazpacho.org/
>
>    On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Charles Strahan <
> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ryan,
>
> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t
> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my
> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could
> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.
>
> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you
be
> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach
of
> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
>
> -Charles
>
>   On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> wrote:
>
>   I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in
> doing it for two reasons:
>
> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to
> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
> bridge.
>
> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.
>
>
>
> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
> I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure if
those are
> the right directions, something else, or what.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Ryan Riley
>
> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
> Twitter: @panesofglass
> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done. I''m
getting close to finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it
in a few weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how
do you want to start?

Ryan

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan, 
> 
> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In
fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could focus
on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.
> 
> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you
be interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach of
essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
> 
> -Charles
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing it for two reasons:
> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
bridge.
> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.
> 
> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure that''s
the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not
sure if those are the right directions, something else, or what.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ryan Riley
> 
> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
> Twitter: @panesofglass
> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
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From the mono-devel list:

On Thu, 2010-08-19 at 10:35 -0700, Ryan Riley wrote:
> Has anyone created or investigated Mono support for libffi?
Once upon a time, Mono used libffi directly.  It was removed in r724
(git SHA1 ID d0cd6059c1b2edad12eb67cb8e64b3cd187be1b1) on 2001-09-05
(and earlier).  Unfortunately, the commit message is useless, but iirc
the reason for removing it was because it was significantly slower than
what Mono could do itself.
> I''d like to contribute this to help support Ruby-FFI for IronRuby.
I imagine IronRuby doesn''t require it''s own FFI, it would just
use the
usual .NET FFI of DllImport, no?

As for supporting Ruby-FFI, perhaps you can extend the existing Mono FFI
support to support Ruby?  I don''t know what would be involved...

- Jon


Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan, 
> 
> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In
fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could focus
on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.
> 
> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you
be interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach of
essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
> 
> -Charles
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing it for two reasons:
> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
bridge.
> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.
> 
> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure that''s
the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not
sure if those are the right directions, something else, or what.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ryan Riley
> 
> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
> Twitter: @panesofglass
> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
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Ryan,

Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got back
to you... and know it''s been quite some time.

I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly,
if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking libffi
<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>).
That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable library, and
possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET
too.

I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. -
I
suppose you could fork it and send me pull requests (unless you have a
better workflow in mind - I''m definitely not a git guru). I''ve
been learning
C/C++ the last couple months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run
our tests against. I think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the
C#
lib. Once we have NFFI working, it should be relatively straightforward to
expose that to the IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed
out to
my repo by the end of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.

That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to suggestions.

-Charles



On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done. I''m
getting close to
> finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in a few
> weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how do
you
> want to start?
>
> Ryan
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Ryan,
>
> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t
> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my
> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could
> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.
>
> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you
be
> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach
of
> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
>
> -Charles
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>
>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing
>> it for two reasons:
>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to
>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
>> bridge.
>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about
FFI.
>>
>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed,
>> so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
>> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
>> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure
if those are
>> the right directions, something else, or what.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ryan Riley
>>
>> Email: <ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org
>> LinkedIn: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley>
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>> Blog: <http://wizardsofsmart.net/>http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>> Website: <http://panesofglass.org/>http://panesofglass.org/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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Sounds good to me!

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan,
> 
> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got
back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
> 
> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly,
if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking libffi). That would give us a good
separation of concerns and a reusable library, and possibly an easy way to port
any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET too.
> 
> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at
http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I suppose you could fork it and send me pull
requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind - I''m definitely
not a git guru). I''ve been learning C/C++ the last couple months, so I
should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests against. I think
I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib. Once we have NFFI
working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to the IronRuby
runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed out to my repo by the end of
tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
> 
> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to suggestions.
> 
> -Charles
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done. I''m
getting close to finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it
in a few weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how
do you want to start?
> 
> Ryan
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Ryan, 
>> 
>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for
inspiration (didn''t know mono had anything - could you share more about
that?). In fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred
bucks on Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I
could focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of
that.
>> 
>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would
you be interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach
of essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
>> 
>> -Charles
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing it for two reasons:
>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
bridge.
>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about
FFI.
>> 
>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed, so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how
to get started? I''ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but
I''m not sure if those are the right directions, something else, or
what.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Ryan Riley
>> 
>> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
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I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes implementation,
under Tomas''
advice. I''ve noticed that their
MemoryHolder<http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs>class
derives from
CriticalFinalizerObject<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx>,
which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution
Regions<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx>
.

I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing
list<http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html>regarding
the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven''t had any
exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone here
would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome.

Any experience with either of those, Ryan?

-Charles


On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
> Sounds good to me!
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Ryan,
>
> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got
> back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
>
> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly,
> if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking
libffi<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>).
> That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable library,
and
> possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET
> too.
>
> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at 
<http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi>
> http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I suppose you could fork it and send me
> pull requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind -
> I''m definitely not a git guru). I''ve been learning C/C++
the last couple
> months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests against. I
> think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib. Once we
have NFFI
> working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to the
> IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed out to my repo
by the end
> of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
>
> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to suggestions.
>
> -Charles
>
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>
>> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done.
I''m getting close to
>> finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in a few
>> weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how
do you
>> want to start?
>>
>> Ryan
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <<charles.c.strahan
at gmail.com>
>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Ryan,
>>
>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for
inspiration (didn''t
>> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In
my
>> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
>> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I
could
>> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of
that.
>>
>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would
you be
>> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the
approach of
>> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib
around that.
>>
>> -Charles
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but
I''m interested in doing
>>> it for two reasons:
>>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and
we''d like to
>>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our
current
>>> bridge.
>>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about
FFI.
>>>
>>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed,
>>> so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
>>> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get
started? I''ve
>>> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not
sure if those are
>>> the right directions, something else, or what.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Ryan Riley
>>>
>>> Email: <ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>>> LinkedIn:
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley>
>>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>>> Blog: <http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
<http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
>>> http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>>> Website: <http://panesofglass.org/>
<http://panesofglass.org/>
>>> http://panesofglass.org/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org>
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>  _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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I''ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes but never
got far.

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
> I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes
implementation, under Tomas'' advice. I''ve noticed that their
MemoryHolder class derives from CriticalFinalizerObject, which led me to the
discovery of Constrained Execution Regions.
> 
> I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing list regarding the use CFO, and
about CER in general, as I haven''t had any exposure to either, and the
MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone here would like to give an
explanation of either one, that would be awesome.
> 
> Any experience with either of those, Ryan?
> 
> -Charles
> 
> 
> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
> Sounds good to me!
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Ryan,
>> 
>> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got
back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
>> 
>> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke
directly, if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking libffi). That would give us a
good separation of concerns and a reusable library, and possibly an easy way to
port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET too.
>> 
>> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at
http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I suppose you could fork it and send me pull
requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind - I''m definitely
not a git guru). I''ve been learning C/C++ the last couple months, so I
should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests against. I think
I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib. Once we have NFFI
working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to the IronRuby
runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed out to my repo by the end of
tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
>> 
>> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to
suggestions.
>> 
>> -Charles
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
>> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done.
I''m getting close to finishing some projects and will have more time to
work on it in a few weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list.
Where/how do you want to start?
>> 
>> Ryan
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Ryan, 
>>> 
>>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for
inspiration (didn''t know mono had anything - could you share more about
that?). In fact, In my infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred
bucks on Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I
could focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of
that.
>>> 
>>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself.
Would you be interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the
approach of essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib
around that.
>>> 
>>> -Charles
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but
I''m interested in doing it for two reasons:
>>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and
we''d like to investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for
our current bridge.
>>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about
FFI.
>>> 
>>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed, so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how
to get started? I''ve been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but
I''m not sure if those are the right directions, something else, or
what.
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> 
>>> Ryan Riley
>>> 
>>> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>>> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>>> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>>> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
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I''ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into
CER''s - it''s
rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx

In laymen''s terms, it looks like CER''s provide reliability
where
asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException,
StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of
MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt the
storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the deallocation
of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I imagined,
this will be something we''ll want to incorporate in our FFI impl.

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx>-Charles

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
> I''ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes but
never got
> far.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes
implementation, under Tomas''
> advice. I''ve noticed that their
MemoryHolder<http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs>class
derives from
>
CriticalFinalizerObject<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx>,
> which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution
Regions<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx>
> .
>
> I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing
list<http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html>regarding
the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven''t had any
> exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone here
> would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome.
>
> Any experience with either of those, Ryan?
>
> -Charles
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>
>> Sounds good to me!
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan <<charles.c.strahan
at gmail.com>
>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Ryan,
>>
>> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got
>> back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
>>
>> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke
>> directly, if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking
libffi<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>).
>> That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable
library, and
>> possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to
C#/.NET
>> too.
>>
>> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at 
<http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi><http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi>
>> http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I suppose you could fork it and send
>> me pull requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind -
>> I''m definitely not a git guru). I''ve been learning
C/C++ the last couple
>> months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests
against. I
>> think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib. Once
we have NFFI
>> working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to the
>> IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed out to my
repo by the end
>> of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
>>
>> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to
suggestions.
>>
>> -Charles
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done.
I''m getting close
>>> to finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in
a few
>>> weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list.
Where/how do you
>>> want to start?
>>>
>>> Ryan
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan
<<charles.c.strahan at gmail.com><charles.c.strahan at gmail.com>
>>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Ryan,
>>>
>>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for
inspiration (didn''t
>>> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In
fact, In my
>>> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
>>> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so
I could
>>> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came
of that.
>>>
>>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself.
Would you be
>>> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the
approach of
>>> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby
lib around that.
>>>
>>> -Charles
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but
I''m interested in
>>>> doing it for two reasons:
>>>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and
we''d like to
>>>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our
current
>>>> bridge.
>>>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more
about FFI.
>>>>
>>>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later
removed,
>>>> so I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not
sure that''s the right
>>>> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get
started? I''ve
>>>> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m
not sure if those are
>>>> the right directions, something else, or what.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Ryan Riley
>>>>
>>>> Email: <ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>>>> LinkedIn:
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley>
>>>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>>>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>>>> Blog: <http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
<http://wizardsofsmart.net/><http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
>>>> http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>>>> Website: <http://panesofglass.org/>
<http://panesofglass.org/><http://panesofglass.org/>
>>>> http://panesofglass.org/
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org><Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org>
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org>
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>>  _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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Here''s Dino Viehland''s response regarding the CERs:

~~~~~~~~

Objects which inherit from CriticalFinalizerObject basically have their
finalize method turned into a CER.  The finalizer method is also JITed
before any instances are created so the finalizer is guaranteed to be
runnable.



In generally CERs are all about ensuring that the VM won?t cause any
unexpected failure points in your code.  These can be introduced because the
VM does something lazily (including JITing methods) and doing the work might
fail due to insufficient resources.  Or it can also be due to thread abort.
Because these objects are responsible for freeing up resources we don?t want
any unexpected failures to be injected otherwise the resources would leak.



So for example MemoryHolder also has a CER in the constructor ? this ensures
that we don?t take a ThreadAbort between the CallocCall, storing the value
in _data, or assigning to _ownsData.  This will all complete or not complete
so that our state is consistent when the finalizer is run.  It also makes
sure that any work the CLR needs to perform to call NativeFunctions.Calloc
is all performed before we enter the CER so that we don?t get an out of
memory exception while calling or returning from it.



For most environments it?s not super important that this is gotten right ?
but if you run in a process which needs long uptime, is resource
constrained, and/or uses thread abort a lot (SQL server being an example of
all 3) it?s important that this is correct.  I happened to work on this
feature when I was on the CLR team so it came rather naturally to me to get
it right J
~~~~~~~~~

-Charles


On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Charles Strahan <
charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I''ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into
CER''s - it''s
> rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx
>
> In laymen''s terms, it looks like CER''s provide
reliability where
> asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException,
> StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of
> MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt the
> storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the
deallocation
> of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I
imagined,
> this will be something we''ll want to incorporate in our FFI impl.
>
> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx>-Charles
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
>
>> I''ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes
but never got
>> far.
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes
implementation, under Tomas''
>> advice. I''ve noticed that their
MemoryHolder<http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs>class
derives from
>>
CriticalFinalizerObject<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx>,
>> which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution
Regions<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx>
>> .
>>
>> I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing
list<http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html>regarding
the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven''t had any
>> exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone
here
>> would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome.
>>
>> Any experience with either of those, Ryan?
>>
>> -Charles
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Sounds good to me!
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan
<<charles.c.strahan at gmail.com>
>>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Ryan,
>>>
>>> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I
got
>>> back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
>>>
>>> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke
>>> directly, if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking
libffi<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>).
>>> That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable
library, and
>>> possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to
C#/.NET
>>> too.
>>>
>>> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at 
<http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi><http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi>
>>> http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I suppose you could fork it and
send
>>> me pull requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind -
>>> I''m definitely not a git guru). I''ve been
learning C/C++ the last couple
>>> months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run our tests
against. I
>>> think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C# lib.
Once we have NFFI
>>> working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that to
the
>>> IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed out to
my repo by the end
>>> of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
>>>
>>> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to
suggestions.
>>>
>>> -Charles
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done.
I''m getting close
>>>> to finishing some projects and will have more time to work on
it in a few
>>>> weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list.
Where/how do you
>>>> want to start?
>>>>
>>>> Ryan
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan
<<charles.c.strahan at gmail.com><charles.c.strahan at gmail.com>
>>>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Ryan,
>>>>
>>>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for
inspiration (didn''t
>>>> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In
fact, In my
>>>> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
>>>> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#,
so I could
>>>> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing
came of that.
>>>>
>>>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this
myself. Would you be
>>>> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take
the approach of
>>>> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an
IronRuby lib around that.
>>>>
>>>> -Charles
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley
at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
>>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but
I''m interested in
>>>>> doing it for two reasons:
>>>>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and
we''d like to
>>>>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for
our current
>>>>> bridge.
>>>>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning
more about FFI.
>>>>>
>>>>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was
later
>>>>> removed, so I think I have a place to start. However,
I''m not sure that''s
>>>>> the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for
how to get
>>>>> started? I''ve been taking a look at libffi and
DllImport, but I''m not sure
>>>>> if those are the right directions, something else, or what.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>
>>>>> Ryan Riley
>>>>>
>>>>> Email: <ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
<ryan.riley at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>>>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>>>>> LinkedIn:
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley>
>>>>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>>>>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>>>>> Blog: <http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
<http://wizardsofsmart.net/><http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
>>>>> http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>>>>> Website: <http://panesofglass.org/>
<http://panesofglass.org/><http://panesofglass.org/>
>>>>> http://panesofglass.org/
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core
at rubyforge.org><Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
>>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org>
>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org>
>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>
>>>>
>>>  _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org
>>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org
>>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>
>>
>
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@Charles

Have you made any progress here? If so, what''s your repo? I''m
looking into
this again this morning.

Cheers,

Ryan Riley

Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
Twitter: @panesofglass
Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
Website: http://panesofglass.org/


On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Charles Strahan <
charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here''s Dino Viehland''s response regarding the CERs:
>
> ~~~~~~~~
>
> Objects which inherit from CriticalFinalizerObject basically have their
> finalize method turned into a CER.  The finalizer method is also JITed
> before any instances are created so the finalizer is guaranteed to be
> runnable.
>
>
>
> In generally CERs are all about ensuring that the VM won?t cause any
> unexpected failure points in your code.  These can be introduced because
the
> VM does something lazily (including JITing methods) and doing the work
might
> fail due to insufficient resources.  Or it can also be due to thread abort.
> Because these objects are responsible for freeing up resources we don?t
want
> any unexpected failures to be injected otherwise the resources would leak.
>
>
>
> So for example MemoryHolder also has a CER in the constructor ? this
> ensures that we don?t take a ThreadAbort between the CallocCall, storing
the
> value in _data, or assigning to _ownsData.  This will all complete or not
> complete so that our state is consistent when the finalizer is run.  It
also
> makes sure that any work the CLR needs to perform to call
> NativeFunctions.Calloc is all performed before we enter the CER so that we
> don?t get an out of memory exception while calling or returning from it.
>
>
>
> For most environments it?s not super important that this is gotten right ?
> but if you run in a process which needs long uptime, is resource
> constrained, and/or uses thread abort a lot (SQL server being an example of
> all 3) it?s important that this is correct.  I happened to work on this
> feature when I was on the CLR team so it came rather naturally to me to get
> it right J
> ~~~~~~~~~
>
> -Charles
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Charles Strahan <
> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I''ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into
CER''s - it''s
>> rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here:
>> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx
>>
>> In laymen''s terms, it looks like CER''s provide
reliability where
>> asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException,
>> StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of
>> MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt
the
>> storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the
deallocation
>> of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I
imagined,
>> this will be something we''ll want to incorporate in our FFI
impl.
>>
>> <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx>-Charles
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
>>
>>> I''ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at
ctypes but never got
>>> far.
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>
>>> On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan
at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes
implementation, under
>>> Tomas'' advice. I''ve noticed that their
MemoryHolder<http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs>class
derives from
>>>
CriticalFinalizerObject<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx>,
>>> which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution
Regions<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx>
>>> .
>>>
>>> I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing
list<http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html>regarding
the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven''t had any
>>> exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If
anyone here
>>> would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be
awesome.
>>>
>>> Any experience with either of those, Ryan?
>>>
>>> -Charles
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Sounds good to me!
>>>>
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>> On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan
<<charles.c.strahan at gmail.com>
>>>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Ryan,
>>>>
>>>> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought
before I got
>>>> back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
>>>>
>>>> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using
P/Invoke
>>>> directly, if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking
libffi<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>).
>>>> That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable
library, and
>>>> possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI
to C#/.NET
>>>> too.
>>>>
>>>> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at 
<http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi><http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi>
>>>> http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I suppose you could fork it
and send
>>>> me pull requests (unless you have a better workflow in mind -
>>>> I''m definitely not a git guru). I''ve been
learning C/C++ the last couple
>>>> months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run our
tests against. I
>>>> think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the C#
lib. Once we have NFFI
>>>> working, it should be relatively straightforward to expose that
to the
>>>> IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed out
to my repo by the end
>>>> of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
>>>>
>>>> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to
suggestions.
>>>>
>>>> -Charles
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <<ryan.riley
at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this
done. I''m getting close
>>>>> to finishing some projects and will have more time to work
on it in a few
>>>>> weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list.
Where/how do you
>>>>> want to start?
>>>>>
>>>>> Ryan
>>>>>
>>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>>
>>>>> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan
<<charles.c.strahan at gmail.com><charles.c.strahan at gmail.com>
>>>>> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Ryan,
>>>>>
>>>>> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI
for inspiration (didn''t
>>>>> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?).
In fact, In my
>>>>> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred
bucks on
>>>>> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to
C#, so I could
>>>>> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but
nothing came of that.
>>>>>
>>>>> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this
myself. Would you be
>>>>> interested in working together?  I figured I''d
take the approach of
>>>>> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an
IronRuby lib around that.
>>>>>
>>>>> -Charles
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley
<<ryan.riley at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>>>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past,
but I''m interested in
>>>>>> doing it for two reasons:
>>>>>> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa,
and we''d like to
>>>>>> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement
for our current
>>>>>> bridge.
>>>>>> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of
learning more about FFI.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that
was later
>>>>>> removed, so I think I have a place to start. However,
I''m not sure that''s
>>>>>> the right starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion
for how to get
>>>>>> started? I''ve been taking a look at libffi and
DllImport, but I''m not sure
>>>>>> if those are the right directions, something else, or
what.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ryan Riley
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Email: <ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
<ryan.riley at panesofglass.org><ryan.riley at panesofglass.org>
>>>>>> ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
>>>>>> LinkedIn:
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley><http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley>
>>>>>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
>>>>>> Twitter: @panesofglass
>>>>>> Blog: <http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
<http://wizardsofsmart.net/><http://wizardsofsmart.net/>
>>>>>> http://wizardsofsmart.net/
>>>>>> Website: <http://panesofglass.org/>
<http://panesofglass.org/><http://panesofglass.org/>
>>>>>> http://panesofglass.org/
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
<Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org><Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>
>>>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org>
>>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org> <Ironruby-core
at rubyforge.org>
>>>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>>>> 
<http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core><http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>  _______________________________________________
>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>> <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org
>>>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>>>  <Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org>Ironruby-core at
rubyforge.org
>>>>  <http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core>
>>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>>
>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ironruby-core mailing list
>>> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
>>> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>>>
>>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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Charles,

 

Have you made any progress with FFI? I have finally finished with all of my
craziness. Of course, the holidays are approaching, but I would love to
investigate this further in the new year.

 

~ Ryan

 

From: ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org
[mailto:ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org] On Behalf Of Charles Strahan
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 2010 11:47 PM
To: ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
Subject: Re: [Ironruby-core] IronRuby FFI

 

Here''s Dino Viehland''s response regarding the CERs:

 

~~~~~~~~

Objects which inherit from CriticalFinalizerObject basically have their
finalize method turned into a CER.  The finalizer method is also JITed
before any instances are created so the finalizer is guaranteed to be
runnable.

 

In generally CERs are all about ensuring that the VM won''t cause any
unexpected failure points in your code.  These can be introduced because the
VM does something lazily (including JITing methods) and doing the work might
fail due to insufficient resources.  Or it can also be due to thread abort.
Because these objects are responsible for freeing up resources we don''t
want
any unexpected failures to be injected otherwise the resources would leak. 

 

So for example MemoryHolder also has a CER in the constructor - this ensures
that we don''t take a ThreadAbort between the CallocCall, storing the
value
in _data, or assigning to _ownsData.  This will all complete or not complete
so that our state is consistent when the finalizer is run.  It also makes
sure that any work the CLR needs to perform to call NativeFunctions.Calloc
is all performed before we enter the CER so that we don''t get an out of
memory exception while calling or returning from it. 

 

For most environments it''s not super important that this is gotten
right -
but if you run in a process which needs long uptime, is resource
constrained, and/or uses thread abort a lot (SQL server being an example of
all 3) it''s important that this is correct.  I happened to work on this
feature when I was on the CLR team so it came rather naturally to me to get
it right J

~~~~~~~~~

 

-Charles

 

 

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Charles Strahan
<charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:

I''ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into
CER''s - it''s
rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx

 

In laymen''s terms, it looks like CER''s provide reliability
where
asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException,
StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of
MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt the
storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the deallocation
of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I imagined,
this will be something we''ll want to incorporate in our FFI impl.

 

-Charles

 

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
wrote:

I''ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes but never
got
far.

Sent from my iPhone


On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
wrote:

I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes implementation,
under Tomas''
advice. I''ve noticed that their MemoryHolder
<http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPy
thon.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs>  class derives from
CriticalFinalizerObject
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution
.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx> , which led me to the discovery of
Constrained Execution Regions
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx> .

 

I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing list
<http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013
757.html>  regarding the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I
haven''t had
any exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone
here would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome.

 

Any experience with either of those, Ryan?

 

-Charles

 

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
wrote:

Sounds good to me!

Sent from my iPhone


On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
wrote:

Ryan,

 

Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got back
to you... and know it''s been quite some time.

 

I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly,
if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking libffi
<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>
). That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable library,
and possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to
C#/.NET too.

 

I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. -
I
suppose you could fork it and send me pull requests (unless you have a
better workflow in mind - I''m definitely not a git guru). I''ve
been learning
C/C++ the last couple months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to run
our tests against. I think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out the
C#
lib. Once we have NFFI working, it should be relatively straightforward to
expose that to the IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something pushed
out to
my repo by the end of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.

 

That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to suggestions.

 

-Charles

 

 

On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
wrote:

Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done. I''m
getting close to
finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in a few
weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how do you
want to start?

 

Ryan

Sent from my iPhone


On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
wrote:

Ryan, 

I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t know
mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my
infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could
focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.

I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you be
interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach of
essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.

-Charles



On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
wrote:

I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing it
for two reasons:

1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d like to
investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
bridge.

2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.

 

Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure that''s
the right
starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure if those
are
the right directions, something else, or what.

 

Thanks,


Ryan Riley

Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
Twitter: @panesofglass
Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
Website: http://panesofglass.org/

_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core

 

_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core


_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core

 

_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core


_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core

 

_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core


_______________________________________________
Ironruby-core mailing list
Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core

 

 

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Ryan,

Have you made any progress with FFI? I have finally finished with all of
my
> craziness. Of course, the holidays are approaching, but I would love to
> investigate this further in the new year.

I haven''t written any code yet (I''ve been rather swamped
lately). I took a
look at the API (http://rdoc.info/github/ffi/ffi) that we''d have to
provide
for a full implementation, and it looks rather daunting. I''m still
reading
through JFFI, JRuby and RubyFFI trying to wrap my head around all of it.

I''m not sure how I would get started right now. However, I''m
going to spend
some time the next couple days trying to figure out how I might attack this.
I''ll be sure to keep this thread up-to-date with my thoughts/feelings
on
this.

Feel free to take the lead if you have a clearer vision of how this needs to
get done; otherwise, I''ll update you on Tuesday or Wednesday.


Cheers,
-Charles


On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>wrote:
> Charles,
>
>
>
> Have you made any progress with FFI? I have finally finished with all of my
> craziness. Of course, the holidays are approaching, but I would love to
> investigate this further in the new year.
>
>
>
> ~ Ryan
>
>
>
> *From:* ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org [mailto:
> ironruby-core-bounces at rubyforge.org] *On Behalf Of *Charles Strahan
> *Sent:* Sunday, October 03, 2010 11:47 PM
>
> *To:* ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> *Subject:* Re: [Ironruby-core] IronRuby FFI
>
>
>
> Here''s Dino Viehland''s response regarding the CERs:
>
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~
>
> Objects which inherit from CriticalFinalizerObject basically have their
> finalize method turned into a CER.  The finalizer method is also JITed
> before any instances are created so the finalizer is guaranteed to be
> runnable.
>
>
>
> In generally CERs are all about ensuring that the VM won?t cause any
> unexpected failure points in your code.  These can be introduced because
the
> VM does something lazily (including JITing methods) and doing the work
might
> fail due to insufficient resources.  Or it can also be due to thread abort.
> Because these objects are responsible for freeing up resources we don?t
want
> any unexpected failures to be injected otherwise the resources would leak.
>
>
>
> So for example MemoryHolder also has a CER in the constructor ? this
> ensures that we don?t take a ThreadAbort between the CallocCall, storing
the
> value in _data, or assigning to _ownsData.  This will all complete or not
> complete so that our state is consistent when the finalizer is run.  It
also
> makes sure that any work the CLR needs to perform to call
> NativeFunctions.Calloc is all performed before we enter the CER so that we
> don?t get an out of memory exception while calling or returning from it.
>
>
>
> For most environments it?s not super important that this is gotten right ?
> but if you run in a process which needs long uptime, is resource
> constrained, and/or uses thread abort a lot (SQL server being an example of
> all 3) it?s important that this is correct.  I happened to work on this
> feature when I was on the CLR team so it came rather naturally to me to get
> it right J
>
> ~~~~~~~~~
>
>
>
> -Charles
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Charles Strahan <
> charles.c.strahan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I''ve decided to not be lazy and do a little spelunking into
CER''s - it''s
> rather interesting stuff. I found a pretty good article here:
>
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163716.aspx
>
>
>
> In laymen''s terms, it looks like CER''s provide
reliability where
> asynchronous exceptions may be thrown: OutOfMemoryException,
> StackOverflowException, and ThreadAbortException. In the case of
> MemoryHolder, this is important because such exceptions could preempt the
> storage of IntPtrs corresponding to allocated memory and/or the
deallocation
> of memory within finalizers - both resulting in memory leaks. As I
imagined,
> this will be something we''ll want to incorporate in our FFI impl.
>
>
>
> -Charles
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> wrote:
>
> I''ve not heard of any of those. I started looking at ctypes but
never got
> far.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>
> On Oct 3, 2010, at 9:27 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I''m also taking a look at IronPython''s CTypes
implementation, under Tomas''
> advice. I''ve noticed that their
MemoryHolder<http://github.com/ironruby/ironruby/blob/master/Languages/IronPython/IronPython.Modules/_ctypes/MemoryHolder.cs>class
derives from
>
CriticalFinalizerObject<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.constrainedexecution.criticalfinalizerobject.aspx>,
> which led me to the discovery of Constrained Execution
Regions<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228973.aspx>
> .
>
>
>
> I sent an inquiry to the IronPython mailing
list<http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2010-October/013757.html>regarding
the use CFO, and about CER in general, as I haven''t had any
> exposure to either, and the MSDN docs are a little daunting. If anyone here
> would like to give an explanation of either one, that would be awesome.
>
>
>
> Any experience with either of those, Ryan?
>
>
>
> -Charles
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> wrote:
>
> Sounds good to me!
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>
> On Oct 3, 2010, at 8:04 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Ryan,
>
>
>
> Sorry for the long delay - I meant to give it some thought before I got
> back to you... and know it''s been quite some time.
>
>
>
> I think it would be a good idea to replicate JFFI, using P/Invoke directly,
> if possible (as opposed to P/Invoking
libffi<http://www.cygwin.org/libffi/>).
> That would give us a good separation of concerns and a reusable library,
and
> possibly an easy way to port any Java/JRuby code that uses JFFI to C#/.NET
> too.
>
>
>
> I''m about to set up an NFFI repo at
http://github.com/cstrahan/nffi. - I
> suppose you could fork it and send me pull requests (unless you have a
> better workflow in mind - I''m definitely not a git guru).
I''ve been learning
> C/C++ the last couple months, so I should be able to write simple DLL to
run
> our tests against. I think I''ll take a TDD approach to driving out
the C#
> lib. Once we have NFFI working, it should be relatively straightforward to
> expose that to the IronRuby runtime. I''ll try to get something
pushed out to
> my repo by the end of tomorrow - I''ll keep you in the loop.
>
>
>
> That''s what I have in mind, but I''m open to suggestions.
>
>
>
> -Charles
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> wrote:
>
> Charles, I''m happy to work with you to get this done. I''m
getting close to
> finishing some projects and will have more time to work on it in a few
> weeks. I will send the info I got from the mono-devel list. Where/how do
you
> want to start?
>
>
>
> Ryan
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>
> On Aug 20, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Charles Strahan <charles.c.strahan at
gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Ryan,
>
> I''m right there with you, only I looked at JFFI for inspiration
(didn''t
> know mono had anything - could you share more about that?). In fact, In my
> infinite laziness, I posted a job for a couple hundred bucks on
> Rent-A-Coder, hoping someone could essentially port JFFI to C#, so I could
> focus on writing the actually IronRuby library... but nothing came of that.
>
> I''m tempted to suck it up and start coding this myself. Would you
be
> interested in working together?  I figured I''d take the approach
of
> essentially writing "NFFI", and then write an IronRuby lib around
that.
>
> -Charles
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Ryan Riley <ryan.riley at
panesofglass.org>
> wrote:
>
> I know that we''ve discussed this in the past, but I''m
interested in doing
> it for two reasons:
>
> 1. We use mono with a bridge to ObjectiveC and Cocoa, and we''d
like to
> investigate libffi via mono as a potential replacement for our current
> bridge.
>
> 2. I''m interested just for the sake of learning more about FFI.
>
>
>
> Mono appears to have had a libffi implementation that was later removed, so
> I think I have a place to start. However, I''m not sure
that''s the right
> starting point. Does anyone have a suggestion for how to get started?
I''ve
> been taking a look at libffi and DllImport, but I''m not sure if
those are
> the right directions, something else, or what.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Ryan Riley
>
> Email: ryan.riley at panesofglass.org
> LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanriley
> Twitter: @panesofglass
> Blog: http://wizardsofsmart.net/
> Website: http://panesofglass.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ironruby-core mailing list
> Ironruby-core at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ironruby-core
>
>
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