Re: [Gcl-devel] UFFI

[Steven H. Rogers]

Hi Camm:

Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings, and thanks for your interest in this!

You're welcome.
> "Steven H. Rogers" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>
> > From reviewing the archives, it seems that while Camm thinks porting UFFI to 
> > GCL would be a good thing to do and should
> > be straight forward, he's too wrapped up with ANSI compliance for 2.7 to 
> > address it in the near term.  Is anyone else
> > working on UFFI for GCL?
>
>
> I do not know of anyone, and I will not have time until ansi is done.
>
> GCL has a well-developed and powerful foreign function interface, but
> not the standard uffi one (yet).  It is based aournd defcfun,
> defentry, and clines (see docs, and threads in gcl-devel for examples
> re: blas library interface).  What is needed is someone who has read
> up on what uffi requires, and can map this functionality to that spec.
>
>
> > If no one is working on this and one were begin this project in the near 
> > future, would it be best to work with GCL 2.6.6
> > or 2.7.0t1?
>
>
> If uffi requires ansi semantics, I'd use the latest testing version,
> which is now Version_2_7_0t2.  Otherwise, I'd use 2.6.6, as nothing
> we're doing in 2.7 is likely to affect what is needed for uffi, and it
> represents a more stable starting point.
>
> Are you volunteering (hope so)?  Can you indeicate what end-user (as
> opposed to developer) applications this might enable on gcl?
I'm tempted to volunteer, but not quite ready to commit.  I've begun looking 
at the UFFI docs and will compare them to GCL's foreign function facilities. 
 I suspect that UFFI will be a functional subset of GCL's FFI, so mapping 
shouldn't be too difficult.

Applications which interest me:

from http://uffi.b9.com/links.html
- clsql
- cl-pdf
- cl-syslog

other
- cells-gtk http://common-lisp.net/project/cells-gtk/

There's a thread on c.l.l about the impedance mismatch between Unix and 
Common Lisp.  I've been thinking about this, and UFFI seems like a way to 
reduce this mismatch.

Regards,
Steve
--
Steven H. Rogers, Ph.D., address@hidden
Weblog: http://shrogers.com/weblog
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
-- John McCarthy