On Sun, 04 Jan 2004 13:09:44 -0500, Richard Kelsey <xxxxxx@s48.org> wrote:

>
> The JNI style of FFI, where the C code has indirect references and
> never the Scheme values themselves, has lots of advantages.  But it
> does add overhead.  I would prefer an FFI that allowed a choice of
> direct or indirect values on a per-function basis.

I think the overhead is largely unimportant. Unless you are interacting
with near-c-speed-sufficiently-smart-scheme-compilers (better think of
crawling-lame-naive-bytecode-interpreter) the overhead of this will
be completely lost in the noise the Scheme implementation produces.

(And so far I haven't seen anybody complain about JNIs performance,
so the performance issue looks a little bit artifical to me)

I think safety and portability is much more important, and I wonder
why the authors of this SRFI are giving it so little thought.

cheers,
felix