[cffi-devel] uffi.asd vs uffi-compat.asd

[Cunningham, Jeffrey K.]

-----Original Message-----
From: Luís Oliveira [mailto:luismbo at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 5:33 PM
To: Cunningham, Jeffrey K.
Cc: cffi-devel at common-lisp.net; clbuild-devel
Subject: Re: [cffi-devel] uffi.asd vs uffi-compat.asd


> If you are interested in the improving the Lisp ecosystem in general,
> then you should understand why I'm worried about the potential
> drawbacks of renaming uffi.asd in the context of clbuild.

> The most obvious one that UFFI is not part of clbuild's projects.
> Secondly, libraries such as CLSQL achieve significantly better
> performance on SBCL using CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT rather than UFFI. Thirdly,
> CFFI (and therefore CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT) supports more Lisps than UFFI;
> so if we disable CFFI-UFFI-COMPAT in clbuild, a couple of libraries
> will stop working on CLISP and others. There might be further
> drawbacks.

> I hope that makes the issue clearer.

> -- 
> Luís Oliveira


I agree - it makes complete sense to me that having UFFI present should not downgrade or in any way deteriorate the performance of any other package in a system. And yet we have this situation where there are some packages that still depend on UFFI, so - in efficient as it may be - it still needs to able to coexist for awhile until those dependencies have been removed. What do you suggest is the best course to follow? Not for me necessarily, but for the "ecosystem" in general. Because I think CL suffers from these issues not being worked out in a systematic or predictable way. 

--Jeff Cunningham