[Ecls-list] Any documentation for the C library?

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Nikhilesh S <s.nikhilesh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There's quite a bit of documentation on the Lisp side in the ECL Manual,
>> but what about the C library (such as 'cl_make_cfun', 'cl_object'
>> etc.)? I searched a bit, but couldn't find anything.
>
> No documentation about that yet. Any function that is defined in the
> Common Lisp standard can be called and works the same as in the
> standard, so there is no need for documenting them. Many functions are
> just optimized versions that do not check arguments, and have the same
> name as the lisp standard functions, but with prefix ecl_ instead of
> cl_ Other functions are for internal use, such as cl_make_cfun, etc
> are in general not expected to be called directly. In general you can
> do pretty much everything with the standard functions, both in lisp
> and in C.
>
> Juanjo

Hi Juanjo,

  I suspect a derivative question is to what extent people having to
write FFI functions using low-level utils can depend on the
stability of data structures defined in object.h.  For example, the
recent addition of Unicode support has the effect of chaning
ecl_array_datat members -- the 'ch' was gone -- therefore
breaking some FFI codes that depended on that.

-- Gaby