From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Neil Jerram Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: Re: dynamic foreign function interface Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:39:02 +0000 Message-ID: <87pr4t7vux.fsf@ossau.uklinux.net> References: <87aaw08pq3.fsf@gnu.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1264714778 13930 80.91.229.12 (28 Jan 2010 21:39:38 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:39:38 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Ludovic =?iso-8859-1?Q?Court=E8s?= , guile-devel@gnu.org To: Andy Wingo Original-X-From: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Jan 28 22:39:35 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: guile-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Nac5P-0001w1-Eb for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:39:35 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:42658 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Nac5O-0006hQ-QI for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:39:34 -0500 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Nac5L-0006h5-Eq for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:39:31 -0500 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Nac5G-0006fp-5W for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:39:30 -0500 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=36077 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Nac5F-0006fm-Vj for guile-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:39:26 -0500 Original-Received: from mail3.uklinux.net ([80.84.72.33]:39415) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1Nac5E-00050t-2T; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:39:24 -0500 Original-Received: from arudy (host86-183-226-102.range86-183.btcentralplus.com [86.183.226.102]) by mail3.uklinux.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C8EA1F6B35; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:39:23 +0000 (GMT) Original-Received: from arudy (arudy [127.0.0.1]) by arudy (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5E53F38024; Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:39:02 +0000 (GMT) In-Reply-To: (Andy Wingo's message of "Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:22:09 +0100") User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1 (gnu/linux) X-detected-operating-system: by monty-python.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.4-2.6 X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library" List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:9946 Archived-At: Andy Wingo writes: > Wow, ok. Well yes, we did always think this was going to happen... so > all right. I'll see what it takes, and merge when ready. FWIW, I'm really pleased to see this so soon. I've been musing that an FFI should allow us to co-opt all the binding libraries out there for other scripting languages, notably Python. (Of course, an FFI will also allow us to use the underlying C library directly, but I would guess that an existing language binding library might have more regular or more introspectable function call signatures than the underlying library, and so it would be easier to generate Scheme-level interfaces automatically.) Also note that if we had a Python (for example) translator, the FFI would make the difference between only being able to execute pure Python code (not using any binding libraries), and being able to execute _all_ Python code. So, great news! Neil