> On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
>
> > ``C -> Haskell, or Yet Another Interfacing Tool''
> > http://www.score.is.tsukuba.ac.jp/~chak/papers/Cha99b.html
> >
Thanks for making the paper available, I enjoyed it a lot.
> Bravo!
>
> I fully endorse your main motivations from your paper:
> 1. Simplification by avoidance of special devoted languages
> and doing everything in Haskell instead.
> 2. Trying to make it generic enough, so it is not tied
> up to MS world (I am - as well as you are, far from
> criticising H/Direct: it has it niche, which is fine
> and cool).
As one of the designers of the new FFI and H/Direct, I do want
to say that there is *nothing* MS or COM specific about H/Direct or the FFI
!
Sigbjorn Finne has done a lot of work to make sure that H/Direct can handle
any
standard and dialect of IDL that is around, including OMG/Corba IDL's.
H/Direct can generate interface code to any C library that is described
with IDL (which is normally just adding some attributes to the C header
file)
This works all fine on Linux or whatever system.
Besides that, H/Direct supports the MS dialect of IDL and can generate COM
interface code. However this is just one part of H/Direct which is
orthogonal
to the C support. Secondly, it is quite easy to extend H/Direct to support
other
protocols (like GNOME).
All the best,
Daan.
