[cffi-devel] Merging the cffi+lotsastuff branch; new dependencies

[Attila Lendvai]

>  I'd prefer if you held off on this one.
>
>  In particular, trivial-features bothers me.  Libraries probably shouldn't
>  modify the features set by an implementation.  I would feel much more
> comfortable if all names were prefixed to reduce conflict.
>  e.g. set :tf-darwin and :tf-linux instead of :darwin and :linux


fwiw, i don't see in what way would it be better if the otherwise
obvious symbol names were prefixed. it would just make the user code
less readable. if tf modifies *features* in a wrong way then it needs
to be fixed.


>  Other thoughts:
>  Babel is used for external string support, right?  Does it slow down the
> base, untranslated case?  Could it be optional/disabled for those of us who
> don't want translation?


there's no untranslated case, you always need to turn lisp strings
into byte-arrays using some encoding before calling C (except if
relying on simple-base-string being ascii only, which is not mandated
by the standard). the lack of proper encoding support was an important
missing feature of cffi.


>  Is there a structural reason to merge grovel with cffi?  If not, could they
> stay separate?  Does that reduce the core CFFI dependencies?  You probably
> integrated grovel for trivial-features...  Could tf search for :cffi-grovel
> in *features* and implement a fallback if not found?

i'm not following you on this... cffi-grovel is a standalone .asd
already, it's just practical to keep it in the same repo as cffi
itself because it tightly depends on cffi and it's rather small to be
a separate project.

-- 
 attila

ps: i just wrote up my 0.02, because usually when change happens only
those speak up who want to hold it back.