Should we consider adding the Common Foreign Function Interface to maiko/medley?

[MattHeffron]

CFFI, the Common Foreign Function Interface, purports to be a portable FFI for Common Lisp. It abstracts away the differences between the API of the native FFI’s of the various Common Lisp implementations.

This could give us access to external libraries, for example, for reading ttf/otf files and getting the glyph bitmaps directly, without needing to generate BDF as intermediate.

CFFI Project
GitHub repository
The Common Lisp Cookbook – Foreign Function Interfaces

[nbriggs]

We used to have FFI, for shared libraries loaded at runtime via SUBR calls (a call to dlopen) - but when we added LP64 (vs ILP32) as a target architecture all that got removed because the existing implementation depended on NOT requiring 64-bit pointers to refer to native addresses.