CFFI govels size_t into :sizet [Was: cffi 0.17.0 breaks some stuff]

[Stelian Ionescu]

> > I've often thought of doing something like this, especially since
> > given a platform, the ABI is well-known. The hard part is
> > determining the platform of the host Lisp,
> > i.e. http://wiki.osdev.org/Target_Triplet.
> 
> 
> FTR, the equivalent of this in cffi/c2ffi is here:
> 
> https://github.com/cffi/cffi/blob/master/src/c2ffi/c2ffi.lisp
> 
> it also includes an final extra 'environment' part, probably LLVM
> wants that, too. yes, it's a kludge, but i think it's worth massaging
> it if the alternative is a hard dependency on a working CC.
> 
> 
> > And this hard-coded file would not have to be generated manually. It
> > can be generated by c2ffi or a similar dedicated program(but for
> > bootstrapping reasons it should probably written in C++),
> 
> 
> you mean here situations where the new platform has no LLVM/clang
> support? c2ffi seems to be able to instruct clang to process the
> header files as if they were on any of its supported platforms,
> regardless of the host where it's currently running. i don't know how
> reliable that is, though. i'd assume it's reliable, it's not science
> fiction to solve this reliably.

Ok, I read the code and (should have done that before), and it seems that it doesn't use CFFI so it should be workable. The only thing missing is the ability to filter definitions(see the last reply).

> > and every time somebody gets an error that their host platform is
> > not supported, tell them to compile and run that program and send us
> > the resulting file to include in the repository. We can easily take
> > care ourselves of x86-pc-linux-gnu, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu,
> > x86_64-pc-freebsd10, x86_64-apple-darwin and x86_64-pc-win32. That
> > should cover 99% of our users.
> 
> 
> if i understand you correctly here, this is pretty much what
> cffi/c2ffi does. with the difference that instead of running a hand
> written C++ code, it just instructs c2ffi to tell LLVM to emit a json
> database of the contents of the requested header files on the new
> platform. this can happen on any host running c2ffi.

The issue with that is that system headers contain a lot of internal auxilliary definitions that can change from one version to the next of the libc, so we want to output only the standard types and nothing else, therefore dumping everything is not an option.

-- 
Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.