Re: [Pika-dev] What's on my plate for Pika...

[Matthew Dempsky]

Andreas Rottmann <address@hidden> writes:

> If I get you right, they want to use the Pika C interface (i.e. FFI)
> for SISC. This would mean Pika and FFI can share C extensions, right?

Yeah, that's the idea.

> The other way round (i.e. making code written using the Pika-style FFI
> usable from guile) should be easier (but probably not as useful, given
> the amount of Guile C code vs. Pika C code).

Actually, that is the goal.  Basically the idea is the same as it is
for SISC -- to reinforce the idea that Pika's FFI is general enough to
serve as a standardized C FFI for Scheme (or to identify areas where
it needs correcting), it would be helpful to be able to say "Hey, look
- you can write code to Pika's FFI and it can interface not only with
Pika, but also [SISC, Guile, or whatever we can manage]."

I'm sure there's a good deal of code already written to specific
implementation FFIs, but the long term plan (or my understanding of it
at lesat) is to get this code ported to Pika so that any
implementation can benefit from it.

(Of course it would also be helpful to be able to automate a process
of porting code using another implementation's FFI to Pika's, but we
can worry about that later.  It will be hard to drive interest into
porting code to Pika's FFI if we can't make that code still usable
with the FFI they're currently using.)

-jivera