[Ecls-list] CFFI and DFFI

[Luis Oliveira]

Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> writes:

> CFFI has some weird assumptions about what a foreign function
> interface can and can not do. It assumes everything has to be dynamic
> while ECL prefers to compile things (the resulting code is more
> efficient)

CFFI is indeed inspired on the FFIs of SBCL, CCL, Allegro, Lispworks,
etc, which have similar implementation strategies, and are all very
different from ECL.


> does not care that functions with varargs ("..." in C) may
> be different from other functions (making our compiled code really
> really unportable)

Does ECL's DFFI have any sort of varargs functionality? If so, we could
use it. How is UFFI any different in that regard BTW?


> It was never built with ECL in mind and development never accepted a
> twist in this direction, that made my initial port very difficult and
> I have never had time to continue supporting it.

We're certainly open to patches/suggestions that help us better support
ECL's static and dynamic FFIs.

Cheers,

-- 
Luís Oliveira
http://student.dei.uc.pt/~lmoliv/