[cffi-devel] Branch: New Type Translator Interface

[Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril]

James Bielman wrote:
>I've done yet-another rewrite of the type translator 
>interface.  It does
>everything through generic functions at run-time, which allows us to
>specialize on both the Lisp object being converted, and the 
>foreign type we are converting to.

How does this interact with compiler macros and the wish for partial evaluation at compile-time?
This remembers me of the AMOP book which carefully distinguishes things possibly known at compile or macro-expansion time from the non-optimizable run-time path.  It's design seems at odd which your approach of mixing both: the AMOP is very careful to separate the possibly known paths (depending on the type) from the unknown (depending on the value) and as a result, separates functions that operate on types only.

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle.