[Bug-zile] Lua FFI progress

[Reuben Thomas]

I spent today writing a JSON backend for ctypesgen, which is a
pure-Python ctypes binding generator. It normally generates Python
bindings directly, but I made it output the info it parses out in JSON
form instead (rather than Lua directly, because that's more useful
generally).

I can read this happily into Lua with LuaJSON of course, so the next
step is to write a JSON to LuaFFI (under LuaJIT) binding module. The
reason not just to use LuaFFI is that first, ctypesgen has a better
parser, and secondly, I could also write an alien backend (alien is a
standalone binding to libffi that is rather more primitive than LuaFFI
but doesn't need LuaJIT; indeed, if I can use alien inside LuaJIT I
may go for that first).

This is of course all directed at getting the Lua bindings for C
libraries written in pure Lua, and leaving only the binding to libffi
in C. posix, regex, and, for standard Lua, bit should be trivial;
curses rather less fun (going by the ad hoc Lua bindings written for
LuaFFI by a kind contributor on the Lua list it should be easy, but
lcurses reveals that there are some fairly nasty things to do
internally for a full-strength binding; I want if possible to replace
the existing libraries for other users, not just for Zile).

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