[Gambas-devel] System calls?

[Benoit Minisini]

On Saturday 31 January 2004 18:58, Ahmad Kamal wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>     Just wondering, had VB been limited only to VB internal functions,
> it would have been very limited, fortunately we had Windows APIs! I was
> wondering if there is any mechanism to enable us to call standard unix
> sys calls (or regular C libs) from within GB (like Dlls from VB). I know
> that that doesn't exist up till now, I am asking if it is possible to
> implement such a mechanism. Would be pretty interesting huh.
>
>

I have already this in mind from a long time! The keyword EXTERN is reserved 
by the compiler for this usage.

The problem I never solved is the following:

When you get a function address via dlopen() and dlsym(), you can't call him 
if you don't know its argument list at Gambas compile time!

I don't know, with gcc, how to dynamically call a function knowing its 
argument list at run time... Without that, I don't know how to implement this 
interesting feature.

Another possibility would be writing a software that takes a library header 
and transform it directly into a gambas component. This is a huge work yet!

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini
mailto:gambas at ...1...