Re: Foreign function interface generators.

[Clifford Beshers <beshers@cs.columbia.edu>]

   Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 15:26:48 PST
   From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
   References: <199711182100.QAA02311@ohanlon.mcl.cs.columbia.edu>
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   Excerpts from ext.guile: 18-Nov-97 Foreign function interface ..
   Clifford Beshers@ohanlon (3200)

   > I'm trying to use guile to do some work and need a decent foreign
   > function interface generator.  The choices from the ftp site seem to
   > be SWIG, g-wrap and ffi.  None seem to fit my needs completely, so, I
   > thought I would try to start a discussion about ffi generators in
   > general to get some progress toward a workable system for guile.

   You probably haven't thought about ILU as an FFI generator, but in fact
   it was originally designed for that purpose, and works pretty well.  See
   the example in the ILU tar file, ILUSRC/examples/multlang/, for an
   example of its use in this way.  More ILU info at
   ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html.

Well, actually, I had.  Last I looked, though, there was only Common
Lisp support.  Also, I had reports that there was a level of wrapping
introduced to achieve the generality and portability requirements,
i.e., it was slower than I wanted.  At the time, the C++ version was
very buggy, which convinced me that perhaps the support team was no
longer so excited about the project.  I decided overall that something
simpler and easier for me to maintain myself would do better.

I have noticed several new ILU announcements, recently (-6 mo.).  I'll
read the page and give it another chance.


Thanks,

Cliff