[cffi-devel] c-string encoding

[James Bielman]

Yaroslav Kavenchuk <kavenchuk at jenty.by> writes:

> The next release of the sbcl will support the external formats in
> SB-ALIEN for c-string.
>
> What about implement of it in the cffi?  There is any code (for the
> further development)?

I'd love to finish this, but I don't personally have any need for it
other than a desire to implement the Right Thing, and not enough time
at the moment...

IIRC, the big chunk of work left in that branch (other than forward
porting to a recent CFFI) is working out what to do on 8-bit,
encoding-unaware Lisp implementations:

Do we want to write portable code to deal with some simple conversions
like latin1 to utf8/16 ourselves, or just bomb on any encoding other
than 1:1?  Or is there an existing conversion library we could use?

If anyone out there looking to contribute wants to work on this, I'd
be happy to take another look at where things are with the branch and
give a more thorough account of what work is left.

Thanks,
James