Re: About Guile crypto support

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi,

Daniel Hartwig <mandyke@gmail.com> skribis:

> By the way, I very much like the conventions used in the GnuTLS
> bindings.  The enums in particular make a lot of sense for a security
> library, with the extreme type safety they provide.  I will pursue a
> similar approach.

Yeah, I think it’s helpful.

> One question.  With the current state of FFI, do you think it matters
> much whether the bulk of the bindings are done in C or FFI?

I think it depends on the amount of public C structs, enums, inlines,
and constants, and how often they are changed.  When there are too many
of them and they are subject to change, it might be easier to use C
(though that can be worked around from the FFI by calling the C
compiler, as in [0].)

My impression is that libgcrypt uses mostly opaque pointer types and has
a stable API, so the using FFI should be just fine.

An issue with the FFI is distros where .la and .so files are only
available in the -dev package, because then ‘dynamic-link’ won’t work
unless that -dev package is installed (as recently discussed on
guile-user.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/libchop.git/tree/guile2/chop/internal.scm#n130