[Gambas-devel] Re: Gambas and Visual Basic (plain text version)

[Jean-Francois Perreault]

Rob wrote:

>
>A number of people have asked for the ability to call C functions from 
>Gambas, or bemoaned the difficulty in using ActiveX/OCX components 
>when translating VB code.
>
>Can you give me an example of a task you need to do from a Gambas app 
>that you could solve with API calls to a C library, but can't solve 
>either by running a program over a pipe with SHELL or EXEC or by 
>opening files directly in /dev, /proc or what have you (as I did with 
>my PVRec example a couple years ago?)  I think VB programmers in 
>particular overlook this, since it's largely impossible to do under 
>Windows.
>  
>

just like that I'd say... ioctl , there are probably a lot of other 
cases that apply but
I'm making a joystick interface class and it won't be complete without 
ioctls

it's probably possible to have an external C program do some ioctl 
operations , but , I don't know C well
enough and some ioctl operation only affect the device for the process 
who did the ioctl so an external
program wouldn't work for that unfortunately

also I suspect there is a major performance penalty to doing that ?

in any case , just that you need to write a C program is already a 
problem , if you don't know C you're stuck

Jean-Francois Perreault