> From: bear <xxxxxx@sonic.net>

    > Let's consider the possibilities of a radically different approach.
    > [i.e., a compute server spec]

Sounds useful but very distinct.

I'm imagining cases like scientists wanting to bind a scientific
numeric libray without being overly tied to a given scheme.  The
latencies of a compute-server approach would be killers.

On the topic of "radical approaches" and in the opposite direction:

My handwavy conceptual view of things is in terms of a vague "design
space of Scheme implementations".

There's a bunch of huge trade-offs you can make (e.g., object
representations; GC strategies).

A truly "portable FFI" has to be agnostic about all of those
trade-offs and thus, necessarily, is limited in what it can do
efficiently.

I hypothesize a "non-portable FFI", largely a superset of the perfect
portable FFI, not limited in what it can do efficiently, which _does_
constrain implementations but, nevertheless, doesn't constrain them in
ways that really matter much.  But that's too big for a SRFI.

-t