I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask this, so please point me to correct direction if it is not.
As far as I know, there is no "native" way of calling C/C++ libraries from within Perl 5. When C/C++ API involves structures, the corresponding Perl binding uses hashes, and an intermediate step converts the hash to a structure, and call the C program with the converted structure. An example of an elegent system which does this is in gtk2-perl (http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net). Muppet, please correct me if I am wrong here. Interfacing C/C++ libs this way involves creation of intermediate structures that duplicates lots of data. (Reminds me the the page cache and buffer cache of the old Linux kernels.) Obviously, Perl can't convert a hash to a structure, because the structure of the structure is not known, although it is a structure ;-) But if the structure of the structure _is_ known, then there is the possibility of kind of "rearranging" the hashes and calling the C/C++ library without duplicating the related data to a seperate structure. I like to get involved in the parrot/perl6 development, and was just wondering if this is something to work on. Anuradha -- http://www.linux.lk/~anuradha/
