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.
Michael Sperber <sperber@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > - Many (but not all) Scheme systems can quite easily support it, > because it already matches the FFI they have currently. > > - There's lots of experience with this kind of FFI, and it's proven > to work (for Scheme systems supporting it) for hooking up a wide > variety of C libraries. Both of these points rest on the issue of "Scheme systems that support it" and I have an uneasy feeling about that. I would be more comfortable with a C FFI SRFI that could be supported by any Scheme system. I believe even some more exotic implementations could provide a Pika-like FFI, but I'll defer until I have more concrete evidence of this before arguing it. > - A Pika-style or JNI-style FFI could be built on top of it, and it > could be built in a portable manner. That doesn't help implementations that can _only_ provide a Pika-style or JNI-style FFI, however. Instead code will be written to support the present FFI and will need to be rewritten before they can be of any use to other implementations that couldn't provide this FFI. > So---while SRFI 50 may not be suitable for a "standard" of any kind, > I'd say there are some arguments in favor of keeping it in place. The > questions are: > > - Do we clean up before moving on? (While leaving its style intact.) > I think this can be done with a reasonable amount of effort. > > - What do we give the result? My inclination is to finalize it, with > a clearly recognizable list of issues at the beginning. I'm mildly confused by this last statement -- are the intentions still to finalize SRFI-50 without resolving the issues brought up on the mailing list or simply to move SRFI-50 to only a pseudo-standard much akin to SYNTAX-CASE is now -- something that many implementations may and can conveniently be used to provide SYNTAX-RULES? It's my understanding that any existing final SRFI _could_ be implemented by every Scheme implementation with primarily minor changes -- most can even be implemented entirely in Scheme. If this is true, then SRFI-50 would set a precedence as the first SRFI that is _not_ portable to every Scheme implementation. I would hate for that to happen on something as crucial as a language interface between one of the most popular languages and one of the best. (Of course I would have no objections to the SYNTAX-CASE-like pseudo-standard, but you could have done that without the SRFI process so I doubt it's up for consideration now.) -jivera