Documentation etc

[Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay dot org>]

Hi.

The quick story: I had a working ffi system, based on ffcall.  At some
point we got to the license issue, where it turned out that the author
went with GPL for ideological reasons.  I'm working on a project
(www.plt-scheme.org) that uses LGPL for reasons that are just as
important for us (our language is obviously the best, so we want to
encourage any usage, commerical or not), which meant that I had to
dump the whole thing.  I've been searching for a substitute for a long
time (~ six months), and ignored libffi which was suggested by several
people, including the GPL guy.

Why did I ignore it?  Well, it looked mostly dead: from the web page
that declares being outdated, through the README file that says the
same, to the mailing list that had more spam than ham in 2003, and
even that didn't help getting above the one message per month average.
Somehow, this piled up to be convincing enough that I never bothered
checking anything else like cvs log, or simply trying it out.

Recently, I've decided to give it a shot, mainly after I've learned
about ctypes that uses it and after I've seen some movement in the
list.  The nice surprise was that I got everything I wanted, and more.
Ripping out the ffcall parts of my project and replacing them with
libffi resulted in better (and shorter, FWIW) code.

Finally, my point: it would be really helpful to change the date on
the web page and on the readme file.  I'm aware now of the fact that
this is in a low, mainly-maintenace, functional stage, but it will be
nice if it didn't try so hard to look dead!  Documentation in any form
would be very nice, even just a tiny addition to the readme, with an
example of using the closure api would be good.  Maybe some glossary
that explains what the different parts do, something aimed at us
mortals who don't spend much time reading gcc sources.  (Obviously,
I'll be happy to help instead of just whine, modulo the usual excuses
about not knowing much besides what I had to deal with to make things
work.)

Second point: it would be extremely sad if it changes to GPL.  For me,
it'll be the second time I'll see a project that I really want to
finish crash and burn because of copyright issues.

(Oh, and BTW, in case anyone reaches this point: I have things working
on a Linux machine.  I suppose that Sun & OSX wouldn't be too
problematic, but there is the usual Windows PITA.  Can anyone save
google some cpu time and throw some pointers?)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!