>>>>> "felix" == felix  <xxxxxx@call-with-current-continuation.org> writes:

felix> How come? What do you mean with "in the way"? Perhaps your
felix> particular high-level interface is insufficient?

It's not about sufficiency.  (Even though both you and Marc admitted
that your particular high-level FFI proposals can only handle most of
what may be needed.)  It's about appropriateness.  When I'm using C
headers to generate FFI information, it seems silly to convert the C
types to their Scheme representation, only to convert them back
again.  (Arguably, the conceptual overhead of representing C types in
Scheme implies that this isn't such a great way of going about linking
in C libraries, after all.)

Marc> In my experience, a high-level FFI that only supports basic types
Marc> common to C and Scheme (numbers of various precisions, Booleans,
Marc> characters, nonnull-strings and possibly-null-strings, and
Marc> null-terminated arrays of strings) is sufficient for most
Marc> applications.
felix> >
>> In my experience, it isn't.
felix> >

felix> Great. With this style of discussion we are getting nowhere...

Now, I've promised myself to not even reply to this kind of trollery
anymore, but here I go again ...

You know the list of FFI bindings I've been involved in; among them
two generations of scsh with full POSIX access (which someone called
"low-hanging fruit" earlier in the discussion.)

But you don't have to take my word.  I invite you to look at
Subversion, one of the few projects that has C FFI bindings for
multiple language implementations, and look at how much effort these
folks need to spend on the implementation-specific type conversion
functions.

--
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla