Re: ffi docs

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello,

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> I reorganized the manual sections on dynamic linking, and wrote some
> sections on the dynamic FFI. I'm appending a text rendering of the
> documentation. Comments welcome!

Not much to say, apart from the fact that I’m happy with all this work!
:-)

I like the introductory text about shared libraries & co., and I like
the tone.

> Most modern Unices have something called "shared libraries".

... or “dynamic shared objects” (DSOs).  [Drepper et al. use this
terminology.]

> to Scheme - and that estrangement extends to components of foreign

This should be an em dash (‘---’ with no space around in Texinfo).

>    (1) Some people also refer to the final linking stage at program
> startup as `dynamic linking', so if you want to make yourself perfectly
> clear, it is probably best to use the more technical term "dlopening",
> as suggested by Gordon Matzigkeit in his libtool documentation.

s/libtool/Libtool/, and an xref to the Libtool manual?

>      ;; struct timeval {
>      ;;      time_t      tv_sec;     /* seconds */
>      ;;      suseconds_t tv_usec;    /* microseconds */
>      ;; };
>      ;; assuming fields are of type "long"

I think this assumption is one of the main pitfalls of a dynamic FFI.
More generally, a problem is that there’s no compile-time check that the
bindings correspond to the C code.  How about adding a paragraph to
mention it?

BTW, I remember seeing occurrences of “her” in new material, where I’d
personally prefer “their” (see <http://aetherlumina.com/gnp/>).

Thanks,
Ludo’.