This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 50 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 50 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Michael Sperber wrote: >>>>>> "felix" == felix <felix@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >felix> But the problem I see with *this* SRFI is that it specifies too >felix> much (IMHO). If SRFI-50 is considered a (slightly) portable FFI >felix> to C, then things could be done considerably simpler, safer and >felix> completely portable (up to a certain point). If SRFI-50 is >felix> only about a semi-standard way of messing with Scheme internals >felix> at the C level, then I'll keep my mouth shut from now on... > >To be honest, you've lost me in a twisty maze of natural-language >semantics. > >*What*? Well, I can't tell for sure what Felix meant, but if I'd said what he said I'd have meant this: I think that you're striking a rather aggressive balance favoring FFI functionality over portability. While there's nothing wrong with that, there's probably room for a simpler SRFI that specifies a less general and more portable FFI. Perhaps that SRFI should come before this one. For the last little while, I've been looking at this SRFI and realizing that it would be an *AMAZING* amount of work to provide it in the context of my particular scheme implementation. But since my particular implementation isn't something anybody else is using, that doesn't actually become anyone else's problem. Still, I probably would never provide SRFI-50 because it would be too much work and most of the hardest work would be spent on fiddly bits of functionality that I'd never use. Other people have different priorities and talents, to be sure. Other scheme systems map in easier and prettier ways to a C runtime (and have, for example, a C stack that's not sliced into chunks and allocated in the scheme invocation frames, and work with, eg, the ascii character set) and could provide it much more easily. But I'd be looking for an easier target. Bear