Re: Development/Production versions (was RE: CVS)

[Noel Welsh <noelw@dai.ed.ac.uk>]

Leo Razoumov writes:
> >>>>> "SK" == Shriram Krishnamurthi <shriram@cs.rice.edu> writes:
>     SK> As I recall, Swig provides Guile bindings.  How about creating one for 
>     SK> MzScheme?  
[snip]

> How about having the wrapper generating engine written in Scheme? After all
> don't we believe that Scheme is the best language of all:-)
> 
> -- Leo

 Eli Barzilay was/is working on a FFI for MzScheme that allows one to
easily call functions in C shared objects. It hasn't made it isn't the
PLT repository yet.

However, C++ is a different beast, because of two wonderfully
stupid properties:
- non-standard name mangling makes it very difficult to call C++
shared objects
- convoluted grammar is very difficult to parse

Now SWIG includes a (mostly) working C++ parser, which is a huge
bonus. Whilst one could reimplement a C++ parser in Scheme I feel
there is much more benefit to be gained by using the work already done 
in SWIG. Two incidentals: Swig 1.3a1 has just been released, and
wxPython is built on Swig (and I occasionally scheme of getting
MzScheme to work with wxWindows 2; apologies for the pun).

SWIG is at http://www.swig.org/

cya,
Noel