I've been doing a lot of FFI work in Scheme lately, and it's finally gotten me to wondering: Is there any good reason to *not* have a standard FFI in Thing2? It seems like traditionally the FFI specification has been considered the sacrosanct territory of implementation-dependent, but I no longer think that makes much sense. At the end of the day, the point of an FFI is to declare to the Scheme run-time how to call bit of non-Scheme code, so it is far more dependent on the underlying operating system ABIs than the architecture of any given run-time - and it seems to me that there just aren't all that many conventions in use by different operating systems (yes - feel free to prove me wrong here :)
I do realize that there are legitimate questions w/rt an FFI that may not be easy to codify - interaction with CALL/CC being among the most obvious - but declaring type mappings and calling conventions for native ABI functions seems fairly straightforward and easily represents a 90% of the work that needs to be done kind of solution. Any takers? david rush -- GPG Public key at http://cyber-rush.org/drr/gpg-public-key.txt _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
