Re: Guile-Git 0.6.0 released; looking for maintainers!

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> An idea might be to look into using nyacc’s ffi-helper to generate
> struct definitions.


over there in CL land i wrote an automatic FFI generator. it's now part of the main CL FFI lib:

https://github.com/cffi/cffi/tree/master/src/c2ffi

it is based on c2ffi:

https://github.com/rpav/c2ffi

which is a piece of C++ code that uses CLANG as a library to parse any C header file, and emit its content into a json file.

a thin layer of lisp code can generate the actual sexp FFI definitions from the json files, that then can be hooked into the usual guile way of doing FFI.

the json files can be checked into the repo, which then eliminates the dependency on c2ffi on the user side (i.e. the project is only as heavy as any other hand-written FFI wrapper). that way only the maintainer needs to regenerate the json files every once in a while.

or short of a smarter build tool like ASDF, we can also check in the generated lisp files.

if there's interest, then i can help porting this over to guile.

below are some example projects that are using it. they are rather thin and simple, yet provide a full FFI:

https://github.com/hu-dwim/hu.dwim.zlib
https://github.com/hu-dwim/hu.dwim.sdl

PS: clang now supports `-ast-dump=json`, which may or may not eliminate the need for c2ffi entirely: https://github.com/rpav/c2ffi/issues/112

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• attila lendvai
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