[cffi-devel] what I like about cffi

[Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril]

Hi,

Mentions of cffi for CLISP from Yaroslav Kavenchuk and not having heard anything from James Bielman for the last 6 month in the clisp mailing list, I was curious and looked at the current cffi sources.

The many short functions make reading the source easy.  I also
appreciate very much the extensible type system.

For example, :string+ptr (returns both foreign pointer and Lisp
string) is very useful (esp. with :malloc/free allocation).  I wonder
whether using that, one can very precisely define the allocation of
substructures, which is not possible with the CLISP FFI.  What I mean
is that :allocation in CLISP guides the whole parameter, and one
cannot say: "stack allocate the structure, but malloc the storage for
this one slot".  It's either take all or nothing.  Well, I think I've
had 1-2 cases where this would have been useful.

BTW, this was also my first use of darcs. I quite enjoy it and
appreciate its interactive mode. I like being able to choose among the
diff snippets when recording a patch.

Is there a means to have darcs show what happened to function foo in file bar (i.e. see the diffs only apropos the current line 100)?

Keep on the good work (still some to do :)

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle