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Re: Pika-style from first principles

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.



> Another way to look at it is that *this* SRFI is exactly about writing
> those conversion functions.  (Or, to put it in Richard's words, "this
> SRFI is not that SRFI.")

OK I understand.

Frankly, I think this is wrong (i.e. proposing this FFI SRFI before a
"higher-level" FFI SRFI is proposed).  If you standardize (through the
SRFI process) low-level functionality before the high-level
functionality is worked out and standardized, you will end up with a
lot of Scheme implementations which will not support it, and a bunch of
users that use this FFI to write their code thinking that it is portable.

In my experience, a high-level FFI that only supports basic types
common to C and Scheme (numbers of various precisions, Booleans,
characters, nonnull-strings and possibly-null-strings, and
null-terminated arrays of strings) is sufficient for most applications.
A form for defining type aliases is also required so that the concrete
representation used by the C code can be abstracted (i.e. is "size_t"
a short, int, long or long long?)

Marc