Re: Binding generator, for Guile, to C libraries

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Danny,

Danny Milosavljevic <address@hidden> skribis:

>>  Matt Wette, the author of nyacc, was apparently in the process of
>> writing a similar tool using nyacc’s C99 parser.  Might be worth
>> looking at.
>
> Nice!  I've actually thought about using nyacc and mes for that - but
> since we use gcc to compile everything, we can also use gcc to find
> out what it compiled

Sure; I think Matt’s idea is just to use nyacc’s cpp/C99 parser to
extract function declarations, nothing more.

>> Besides and FWIW, I’m skeptical of binding generators.  Things like
>> SWIG, for instance, generate interfaces that are often not quite
>> what you’d like, so you end up writing a layer on top of the
>> generated glue anyway, not to mention annotation in headers.
>
> Yeah, probably the bindings will suck a bit.  But one can always write
> a wrapper and not export all the original functions from there.  Rust
> for example has a "...-sys" convention where the package "foo-sys"
> contains the easily-generated bindings and the package "foo" contains
> the actually simple high-level bindings.
>
> What I don't want is to manually maintain all the bindings.  It's a
> computer, it should automate it :P
>
> Writing "override" declarations (or maybe even just literally
> overwriting the definition in Scheme) once every few months I'm fine
> with.  Adapting the bindings every time upstream adds a function?  No.
>
> If I plan to use something like the "...-sys" convention in Guile, can
> I somehow re-export all the same names as the "-sys" package did, in a
> non-sys package?
>
> For example:
>
> (define-module (foo-sys) #:export (a b c))

Yes, that’s a workable plan.  I’m unsure this approach saves a lot of
time over “hand-written” FFI bindings (I write “hand-written” with
quotes because usually you’d come up with macros to do the heavy lifting
for the library you’re wrapping), but maybe you’re right!

Ludo’.