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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.



>>>>> "Marc" == Marc Feeley <feeley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

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

I don't follow this argument.  (Actually, I can't follow a single step
of it.)  Why does any low-level FFI automatically imply "a lot of
Scheme implementations which will not support it," and how is this
fact changed by having a high-level interface first?

I'd say the low-level stuff is exactly the place to start, because it
can be used to explain the semantics of any high-level mechanism.
Moreover, there are lots of ways of interfacing C code where a
high-level interface would only be in the way---specifically, when
generating the glue code from header files, SWIG-like descriptions, or
some other set of pre-existing bindings.

Marc> In my experience, a high-level FFI that only supports basic types
Marc> common to C and Scheme (numbers of various precisions, Booleans,
Marc> characters, nonnull-strings and possibly-null-strings, and
Marc> null-terminated arrays of strings) is sufficient for most
Marc> applications.

In my experience, it isn't.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla