Wrapping shared variables using Rebol 3 FFI

Question

Atronix Rebol 3 FFI looks pretty good in wrapping external functions, but I cannot find any references about wrapping external variables using it.

For example, Curses/NCurses library have the external variable stdscr defined in C as

extern WINDOW *stdscr;

I want to use it in my Rebol code. Ideally I want to use it as a common Rebol variable, but a read-only access (as a result of a function call, for example) would be great too.

Is it possible with Rebol 3 FFI?

I know that this practice might be considered harmful, but sometimes external libraries are written this way.

In my humble case I've just wrapped **stdscr** as it is done in Red/System curses binding, but the problem is still open. — Ivan Sukin, Oct 13 '15 at 07:46

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 14 '15 at 16:27

You can do this with the commit. Prebuild binaries can be downloaded from here (only in development releases)

Here is the example code:

rebol []

ncurses: make library! %libncursesw.so

stdscr: make struct! compose/deep [
    [
        extern: [(ncurses) "stdscr"]
    ]
    ptr [pointer]
]

print ["stdscr:" stdscr/ptr]
close ncurses

Wrapping shared variables using Rebol 3 FFI

1 Answers1