[Axiom-developer] FFIs and Lisp

[C Y]

--- "Page, Bill" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I think you are right that Aldor should probably generate the
> defentry but foreign language interface is still not that
> standard in lisp, so what Aldor does might not be too portable.
> Since the current versiono of open source Axiom uses gcl, the
> foreign call mechanism would have to be compatible with this.

GCL is actually at a bit of a disadvantage here, at least from a
standards point of view.  CFFI is becoming the "de-facto" standard Lisp
FFI, or at least is doing better at it than any previous effort.  GCL
doesn't yet support CFFI - I'm not sure if it requires ANSI to have a
hope of functioning but I wouldn't be surprised.

An interesting aside is the SWIG tool can apparently be used to
generate CFFI bindings for some libraries - http://www.swig.org/  I
don't know if this is particularly helpful to Axiom, but it is
certainly an interesting option to have available.

Cheers,
CY

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