Re: Dynamic FFI vs Static FFI (was Re: About Guile crypto support)

[Mark H Weaver]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> At some point, it might make sense to create a more static FFI that
>> works more like a C compiler does, splitting the job into compile-time
>> and run-time phases.  This static FFI would be strictly less powerful
>> than the dynamic FFI, in a similar sense to how syntactic record APIs
>> are less powerful than procedural ones.  However, the static FFI would
>> be sufficient in most cases, and would have some advantages.
>
> In my mind the “static FFI” is the C API, and the dynamic FFI is
> (system foreign).
>
> To me, the main advantage of the latter is its simplicity of use and
> deployment.

Okay, but here I'm using "Static FFI" to mean something very different
than the C API: I'm talking about a pure scheme-based API that would be
quite similar to the API our current dynamic FFI, except that a lot of
the work would be done at compilation time (probably during macro
expansion).

I don't care what terminology we use to describe it, but that's the idea
that I intended to start a discussion about.

    Mark