Re: G-Wrap 1.9.13 released

[Andreas Rottmann <a.rottmann@gmx.at>]

[CC'ing Marco, as this might very well be of interest to him]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> On a related, but unrelated note: I know you have some experience with
> Scheme FFIs. I don't, and Guile needs one. Do you have any pointers?
> Would you like to make a design?
>
It just happens that Marco Maggi and me have agreed to unify our FFI
implementations in the near future; I have `(spells foreign)'[0], and he
has an FFI in his nausicaa library collection[1]. 

I hope (and kind of expect, even :-)), that the result of this effort
will be a low-level FFI in the spirit of CL's CFFI-SYS[2], with some
documentation, and working on Ikarus, Ypsilon, Larceny, Mosh and PLT
Scheme. This layer will be rather minimimal, and not very nice for doing
hand-written glue code in, but it will suffice nicely to support
sbank[3], for example. It should provide all primitives to build more
sophisticated FFI layers on top of it.

> Or some code even? :-))
>
I think when we have some documentation out there, it should be
relatively straightforward to do an implementaton for Guile -- I could
very well imagine I will be tempted at some point to rip the guts out of
G-Wrap, and use them to build an implementation for Guile, just for the
heck of it :-). We'll see -- the above-mentioned unification hasn't
really begun yet, but I expect that there will be something to show by
the start of next year or so.

[0] http://github.com/rotty/spells/blob/master/spells/foreign.sls
[1] http://github.com/marcomaggi/nausicaa/blob/master/scheme/src/libraries/foreign/ffi.sls
[2] http://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/spec/cffi-sys-spec.html

Regards, Rotty
-- 
Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.yi.org/>