FerretX

Intro

The key idea here is to make it easier for any language to make use of libraries written in any other language, and for compiled languages to make use of compiled libraries without having to recompile and link them. It also is especially useful in integrated development environments with code-aware autocompletion (CAA) features, in that it provides the necessary information for CAA when using a library whose source-code is not included in the project.

The immediate need for this comes from my wish to use certain libraries in PHP that are well-supported for other languages but either not available in PHP at all or else poorly supported -- notably graphical interfaces and "ncurses" (a full-screen text-mode library).

The inspiration for this is a Microsoft technology which I think was called "ActiveX DLLs", but the Wikipedia entry on ActiveX only mentions it in passing and certainly doesn't do credit to how useful it was in environments like Visual Basic 6 and Access 97.