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> From: bear <bear@xxxxxxxxx>
> Let's consider the possibilities of a radically different approach.
> [i.e., a compute server spec]
Sounds useful but very distinct.
I'm imagining cases like scientists wanting to bind a scientific
numeric libray without being overly tied to a given scheme. The
latencies of a compute-server approach would be killers.
On the topic of "radical approaches" and in the opposite direction:
My handwavy conceptual view of things is in terms of a vague "design
space of Scheme implementations".
There's a bunch of huge trade-offs you can make (e.g., object
representations; GC strategies).
A truly "portable FFI" has to be agnostic about all of those
trade-offs and thus, necessarily, is limited in what it can do
efficiently.
I hypothesize a "non-portable FFI", largely a superset of the perfect
portable FFI, not limited in what it can do efficiently, which _does_
constrain implementations but, nevertheless, doesn't constrain them in
ways that really matter much. But that's too big for a SRFI.
-t