>>>>> Marius Vollmer writes:
MV> That's true. But I'd say that it's the usual tradeoff: quick
MV> development with an interpretive approach, and good performance
MV> with a compiler.
Yep, but my machine is already fast enough that performance isn't an
issue any more (since the main hit is in initialization), and it's two
years old.
MV> Furthermore, I'm not convinced that we can get reliable bindings
MV> to C code without the help of a C compiler.
Anything a C compiler can do, Scheme can do better. ;)
MV> Does libffi know everything it needs to know about the ABI of a
MV> platform.
The libffi sources imply that it does.
MV> Can we extract all necessary information from header
MV> files, without reimplementing much of the compiler frontend?
I believe so. However, as with all wrappers, we need some human
intervention:
char **
might be a vector of strings, or else a modifiable string pointer.
I've been thinking long and hard about this issue, not in the context
of Guile, but in the context of a function call interface that is
portable to all platforms (and which doubles as a database format).
My task is to wrap the entire GNU C library in Guile, and that is much
too hard to write and maintain static C bindings. Basically, for
every public /include/some/file.h, I want to create a
/share/guile/gnulib/some/file.scm module that provides Scheme
bindings.
This is a reasonable task, with a little work.
MV> You, I'd like to help where I can. My current focus is on the
MV> Guile to Gtk+ bindings, which is developing into a quite general
MV> glue generator. It is currently very much on the static side,
MV> but putting some libffi into it to make it more dynamic would be
MV> cool.
I want to take the same approach with GTK+, so I'll fetch your work
and see what I can contribute. Benchmarking between the two
approaches will reveal a lot, IMO.
MV> Tom Lord has interfaced Systas (which is an offspring of Guile, I
MV> think) to a C parser. That could be very helpfull for parsing
MV> header files.
Do you know where I could find this?
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