Sep 18th 4 min read #Parataxis.pm Parataxis, Eventually Game loops, polling mechanics ("send a heartbeat ping every 5 seconds"), and API integrations ("only make 10 API requests per second to Stripe") requi...
Sep 18th 8 min read #Parataxis.pm Parataxis in the Not Too Distant Future I'm still planning and framing things out but I have further ideas. I'm still digging into distributed and concurrent systems like Erlang/OTP, Clojure...
Sep 15th 6 min read #Parataxis.pm Parataxis in the Near Future I've been looking at other concurrency systems as I tinker and I am determined to bring what I've found to this project. No more introduction, let me...
Sep 07th 5 min read #Alien::Xmake Binary Aliens: Shipping Tools, Not Just Libraries Perl's Alien ecosystem has always been synonymous with one thing: fine grained access to shared libraries. You write an Alien module so that Affix or...
Sep 01st 6 min read #Alien::Xmake Reproducible Aliens: Keeping the Native Store Project-Local If you've ever installed a CPAN distribution on two different machines and been surprised when the C extension links against different versions of lib...
Sep 01st 5 min read #Alien::Xmake Three Ways to Bind: Inline::C vs. Affix vs. FFI::Platypus You've installed a native library with Alien::Xrepo. Now what?...
Sep 01st 4 min read #Alien::Xmake xmake as a Build Back-End for Perl + C Projects If your Perl distribution contains C code that needs to be compiled (an .xs extension, a helper tool, or a shared library for FFI) you have traditiona...
Sep 01st 10 min read #Alien::Xmake The Great Divide: Alien::Build vs. Alien::Xrepo::Base Perl/XS developers have almost always faced a dependency problem: how do you ensure a CPAN module can find, download, and build a non-Perl library? Wh...
Aug 12th 4 min read #Affix.pm Just-in-Time API Generation We've spent the previous 50 chapters binding to existing C libraries or writing our own static extensions. For the grand finale, we'll look at the ult...
Aug 10th 2 min read #Affix.pm Cross-Compiling with Zig CC Developing on Linux but need to test a Windows .dll? Zig ships a single toolchain that can cross-compile for any target, and Affix::Build speaks Zig n...
Aug 10th 4 min read #Affix.pm C++ VTables and ThisCall Integration In previous chapters, we bypassed C++ name mangling and wrapper shims by manually ripping the Virtual Method Table (vtable) out of a C++ object and ca...
Aug 10th 3 min read #Affix.pm The `sizeof` the Universe (Runtime Introspection) Sometimes you don't want to call a C function; you just want to use C's knowledge of memory layout. If you are parsing a binary file format or a netwo...
Aug 09th 5 min read #Affix.pm The "Universal Object" Pattern In previous chapters, we hacked a C++ vtable and learned to use ThisCall to pass the object context smoothly. Now, we're going to combine those techni...
Aug 09th 9 min read #Affix.pm Pointers with Personality: How Affix Rethinks FFI Memory When bridging Perl with C, the most common stumbling block is the pointer....
Aug 08th 11 min read #Affix.pm Eliminating the "FFI Tax": Zero-Copy C Memory in Perl with Affix Foreign Function Interfaces (FFI) are the holy grail of language interoperability. They allow us to call native C, Rust, or Go libraries directly from...
Aug 08th 3 min read #Affix.pm Emulating Native 128-bit Integers in Perl Modern system programming frequently requires numbers larger than 64 bits. IPv6 addresses, UUIDs, cryptography algorithms, and specialized high-precis...
Aug 05th 4 min read #Affix.pm Dealing with Flexible Array Members (FAM) C99 introduced flexible array members, which allow structure to end with an array of unspecified size. This is a common pattern for packets of data w...
Aug 04th 2 min read #Affix.pm N-Dimensional Arrays & Tensors Standard FFI examples usually show 1D arrays (a list of numbers). But real-world data like images, matrices, and physics grids are often N-dimensional...
Aug 03rd 4 min read #Affix.pm Hardware Registers and Bitfield Packing In embedded systems, binary file formats, and network protocols, space is at a premium. Instead of using a whole int for a boolean flag, programmers o...
Mar 05th 6 min read #Affix.pm Cooperative Fibers in FFI As you likely know, Perl 5 is fundamentally single threaded. While threads.pm allows for concurrency, it creates "heavy" threads that clone the entire...
Mar 05th 4 min read #Affix.pm Performance Optimization with Memory Arenas Frequent calls to malloc() and free() (or Perl's new and garbage collection) can become a significant bottleneck in performance-critical code. Each al...
Mar 05th 4 min read #Affix.pm FFI in a Multithreaded System Perl's threads.pm implements "heavy" threads, where each thread is a complete clone of the interpreter. While this model provides excellent isolation,...
Jan 20th 1 min read #infix C++ Exception Unwinding I've put it off for months but now have unit tests that sorta kinda demonstrates it. [Edit: I have no roadmap or timeline but] I'll need to come back...
Jan 11th 3 min read #Affix.pm Absolute Power with Assembly and Perl C is often called "portable assembly," but sometimes you need the real thing....
Jan 11th 3 min read #Affix.pm Scientific Speed with Fortran and Perl If you are doing heavy scientific computing, you will eventually encounter Fortran (BLAS, LAPACK)....
Jan 11th 4 min read #Affix.pm Oxidizing Perl Binding to Rust Perl is great for glue; Rust is great for logic....
Jan 11th 6 min read #Affix.pm Unlocking the C C Ecosystem with Affix Wrap and Alien Xrepo In previous chapters, we compiled code directly or used Alien::Base to find system libraries. But sometimes you want a library that isn't installed on...
Jan 08th 6 min read #Affix.pm Packaging an Affix Build Module for CPAN with Module Build In the previous chapter, we built a script that compiles its own dependencies. To share this on CPAN, we want a standard module structure....
Jan 07th 5 min read #Affix.pm The Zero-Dependency Image Processor For our next trick, we'll tackle the most common headache in the C ecosystem: Dependency Hell. Usually, if you want to manipulate images, you need lib...
Jan 04th 4 min read #Affix.pm SIMD Vectors for Number Crunching Standard Perl scalars are designed for flexibility, not raw math throughput. When you need to process millions of coordinates, pixels, or audio sample...
Jan 04th 8 min read #Affix.pm SIMD and Matrix Benchmarks So, you read previous chapters on this same topic, but the ultimate question remains: "Is it fast?"...
Jan 04th 5 min read #Affix.pm Wrapping C Classes by Hacking Vtables In a previous chapter, we wrapped C++ classes using extern "C" helper functions in a shim. That is the 'Right Way.' But what if you are stuck with a p...
Jan 04th 4 min read #Affix.pm Wrapping C Classes with C Shims C++ libraries are notoriously difficult for FFI systems to bind. Unlike C, which uses standard symbol names, C++ "mangles" function names (for example...
Jan 04th 3 min read #Affix.pm An Affix Module Factory While runtime wrapping is convenient, it has a startup cost (parsing headers every time). For a distributable CPAN module, you want the parsing to hap...
Jan 04th 3 min read #Affix.pm Instant Runtime Wrappers The fastest way to use Affix::Wrap is runtime wrapping. In this workflow, you parse the headers and bind the functions immediately when your script st...
Jan 03rd 3 min read #Affix.pm Automated Introspection with Affix Wrap Writing affix signatures manually is great for control, but it becomes tedious when wrapping a library with hundreds of functions and structs. Instead...
Dec 30th 4 min read #Affix.pm The Kitchen Sink Polyglot Library Sometimes, the best tool for the job involves three different tools. You might have legacy math models in Fortran, performance-critical loops in Assem...
Dec 30th 6 min read #Affix.pm The Instant Assembly C D Fortran Go Rust Zig Library C might be the lingua franca of system programming, but Affix::Build is a true polyglot. We've covered building shared libraries in C and C++ but Affi...
Dec 29th 3 min read #Affix.pm Perl Callbacks in C Structs vtables In C, OOP is often simulated using structs containing function pointers. This pattern is commonly known as a vtable and allows a library to call diffe...
Dec 29th 1 min read #Affix.pm Automatic Resource Management RAII Manual free() is error-prone. We can use Perl's DESTROY phase to automate it....
Dec 29th 4 min read #Affix.pm Troubleshooting Debugging When things go wrong in Perl, you probably get an error message. When they go wrong in C, you get a segfault, a frozen terminal, or data corruption th...
Dec 29th 1 min read #Affix.pm Error Handling System calls fail. In C, you check the global errno variable (or GetLastError() on Windows). In Affix, we expose this via errno()....
Dec 29th 6 min read #Affix.pm Advanced File Handling Bridging I/O between languages is historically one of the most fragile aspects of FFI. While handling file descriptors manually as opaque pointers may...
Dec 28th 3 min read #Affix.pm Direct Marshalling Trampolines Speed is the reason I wrote infix and Affix and I think I've achieved a good balance of features vs. speed. I've done a lot of work to reduce overhead...
Dec 27th 4 min read #Affix.pm Smart Enums C headers are full of enum definitions. To the C compiler, these are just integers. To the programmer, they have semantic meaning. When binding these...
Dec 27th 2 min read #Affix.pm Callbacks Context Closures In a previous chapter, we passed a simple callback. But real-world C libraries often take a callback and an opaque pointer (usually something like voi...
Dec 27th 3 min read #Affix.pm Transparent Structs Sometimes you need to peek inside the oven. If a function expects a C style struct to be passed by value or if you want to read struct members without...
Dec 26th 4 min read #Affix.pm Callbacks C libraries often use callback functions to delegate logic back to the user. The standard library's qsort is the classic example: it knows how to sort...
Dec 26th 4 min read #Affix.pm Variadic Functions Some C functions don't have a fixed number of arguments. The most famous example is printf, which takes a format string and... almost everything else....
Dec 24th 3 min read #Affix.pm Mutable Arrays In C, arrays passed to functions are often used as output buffers. The function reads data from the array, modifies it in place, and expects the calle...
Dec 24th 3 min read #Affix.pm Arrays vs Pointers In C, arrays and pointers are cousins. In function arguments, they are twins. Declaring void func(int a[]) is exactly the same as void func(int *a). H...
Dec 24th 4 min read #Affix.pm System Libraries on Linux Perl scripts often live in the terminal or deep inside a server handing out webpages or whatnot, but they don't have to stay there. Earlier, in chapte...
Dec 24th 3 min read #Affix.pm Manual Memory Management Perl handles memory for you. C does not. When you start allocating raw memory buffers in Affix, you are stepping into the C world. This recipe demonst...
Dec 24th 4 min read #Affix.pm Opaque Pointers Affix cannot directly instantiate a C++ class or read a C struct unless we define every single field with the correct type and in the proper order. Of...
Dec 24th 2 min read #Affix.pm The Standard Library Every operating system comes with a "C standard library" or, simply, libc. It contains the fundamental building blocks of C programming: memory alloca...
Dec 23rd 4 min read #Affix.pm Strings and Static State Dealing with C strings usually involves asking "Who owns this memory?"...
Dec 23rd 3 min read #Affix.pm Binary Data and the Null Byte Trap C strings are simple: they start at a memory address and end at the first zero/null byte (\0). But what if your data contains nulls? If you use standa...
Dec 23rd 3 min read #Affix.pm Speaking Windows When interacting with the Windows API (Win32), you will inevitably face two facts: libraries are named things like user32.dll, and text is almost alwa...
Dec 22nd 4 min read #Affix.pm The Instant C Library Sometimes, you don't have a pre-existing .dll or .so file. Sometimes, you just have an idea, a heavy mathematical loop, or a snippet of C code you fou...
Dec 22nd 7 min read #Affix.pm Welcome to the Affix Cookbook Welcome to the Affix Cookbook! This guide is a living collection of recipes, techniques, and architectural patterns for mastering Foreign Function Int...
Nov 23rd 5 min read #infix Packed Trampolines We have nearly reached the end of the current roadmap. infix is fast, secure, and portable. But optimization is an addiction, and I am already looking...
Nov 16th 5 min read #infix Language Specific Trampolines This is an explanation and expansion of discussion #26 now that I've started actually implemented and designed my idea....
Oct 28th 7 min read #infix System calls via FFI I've had this idea for a while now and might put effort into it next. I understand that this would be a massive task but the first 30% of it is alread...
Oct 11th 2 min read #infix Coercion of arguments into a solid block of memory Shower thought time... Internally, would it be faster to coerce args that would end up on the stack into a single block of malloc'd memory? Currently,...
Jul 05th 1 min read #Affix.pm Todo list Features I'd love to include when I have the time will find their way here....