Primarily just a placeholder issue for now but wanted to mention that after further investigation I've gotten some hacky buffer support working--which can be made even more hacky to somewhat support structs.
I've moved away from the PoolByteArray approach (at least initially) because neither it nor StreamPeerBuffer (nor any other builtin Godot type) seem to support shared/non-Copy-on-Write access to memory/buffers (Array & Dictionary are shared but don't offer direct access). (Also Pool*Array is changing implementation in 4.0 to use Vector so don't know what effect that will have.)
Plan to push a hacky proof-of-concept implementation and add further notes at some point after I've finished with the cross-platform build support in #9.
Buffer/Struct API design considerations
As an additional point of consideration, lacking other design inspiration, one option could be to copy however much of the Python ctypes approach makes sense: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html
Conclusion
But, suffice to say, being able to wrap a pre-existing binary library with just foreigner.so & pure GDScript is very very cool. :)
Progress so far
Primarily just a placeholder issue for now but wanted to mention that after further investigation I've gotten some hacky buffer support working--which can be made even more hacky to somewhat support
structs.I've moved away from the
PoolByteArrayapproach (at least initially) because neither it norStreamPeerBuffer(nor any other builtin Godot type) seem to support shared/non-Copy-on-Write access to memory/buffers (Array&Dictionaryare shared but don't offer direct access). (AlsoPool*Arrayis changing implementation in 4.0 to useVectorso don't know what effect that will have.)Plan to push a hacky proof-of-concept implementation and add further notes at some point after I've finished with the cross-platform build support in #9.
Buffer/Struct API design considerations
As an additional point of consideration, lacking other design inspiration, one option could be to copy however much of the Python
ctypesapproach makes sense: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.htmlConclusion
But, suffice to say, being able to wrap a pre-existing binary library with just
foreigner.so& pure GDScript is very very cool. :)