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On Sun, 04 Jan 2004 13:09:44 -0500, Richard Kelsey <kelsey@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The JNI style of FFI, where the C code has indirect references and never the Scheme values themselves, has lots of advantages. But it does add overhead. I would prefer an FFI that allowed a choice of direct or indirect values on a per-function basis.
I think the overhead is largely unimportant. Unless you are interacting with near-c-speed-sufficiently-smart-scheme-compilers (better think of crawling-lame-naive-bytecode-interpreter) the overhead of this will be completely lost in the noise the Scheme implementation produces. (And so far I haven't seen anybody complain about JNIs performance, so the performance issue looks a little bit artifical to me) I think safety and portability is much more important, and I wonder why the authors of this SRFI are giving it so little thought. cheers, felix