Two Big Bindings and One Little Binding - Graham Ollis - TPRC 2024

#tprc2024 #perl #raku
Practical Perl bindings with FFI::Platypus. We will see two real world examples of large C libraries and one smaller Rust one. This will inform a discussion of how Perl bindings could and maybe should evolve in Perl.Writing bindings for libraries for Perl typically falls on the Perl developer who needs it first. As with anything Perlish there are lots of ways to do this (XS, SWIG, FFI, etc). There are some intrinsic advantages and challenges for using FFI::Platypus in some cases, and I will demonstrate this with two large C library bindings: libarchive and libcurl. Platypus was designed from the beginning to play nicely with non-C programming languages so we will also poke around with a Perl + Rust binding to see how that differs.
Once we have all of that under our belt I think it is time to talk about the challenges writing library bindings for Perl, both technical and political, and how we might start to address them.