[cffi-devel] Re: Use of Babel and Alexandria in CFFI

[Tobias C. Rittweiler]

"Luís Oliveira" <luismbo at gmail.com> writes:

> Assuming that you find at least some of Alexandria's utilities useful
> -- say PARSE-BODY -- consider that while these are typically short
> pieces of code, many deal with subtle details that can go wrong.
> Getting these from a library that includes a test suite and is
> shared/used/reviewed by many other programmers sounds like a good idea
> to me.

This statement should be stressed. A lot of utility functions that you
usually write on the way are written very ad-hoc for the task at
hand. And even if you do the extra effort, and try to make them more
general, they're often broken in edge-cases.

Having contributed to Alexandria, I can say that caring about all the
minutiae that are involved is very burdensome and strenuous. It made me
understand how the ANSI standard took a decade to be produced.

  -T.