Hi Chapel Developers --
I want to float an idea that's been proposed for quite some time, but
which I've only started to prototype tonight. The motivation is that you
are a user or developer writing a wrapper for some external library, so
you create a Chapel module, Foo, that wraps its externed routines.
However, at present, for a user to make use of such a module, they'd also
need to list the .h, .c, .o, .a files on the 'chpl' command-line in order
for the compiler to know what headers to include and what to link against.
This puts an unfortunate burden on the user.
So, the proposal is to permit library developers to specify these
dependences within the module itself. This could be done using new
syntax/keywords (in which case, we'd need a proposal), or by extending the
'use' keyword to take string literals that would be treated similarly to
how they would be if listed on the command-line.
I've partially prototyped this capability tonight by adding support for
'use'-ing .h, .c, and .o files from within a module (available in a very
rough draft form on my use-other-stuff branch for anyone that wants to
take a look). I've used the 'use' keyword for this purpose for now, both
for simplicity and because it didn't require any parser changes (!).
Pieces that are missing, and required for the capability to be useful, I
think, are some combination of:
1) support for expanding shell variables in such strings
and/or
2) support for specifying "-I", "-L", "-l" variants of such
strings
and/or
3) support for specifying ".a" and/or ".so" files in such strings
Before going much further, I wanted to check in and get commentary,
though:
Q: Do you like the general idea?
If so...
Q: Do you prefer overloading 'use' or some other syntax? (must propose an
alternative, if that's your choice)
Q: Which of the three "and/or" options above are you in favor of? (choose
0-3, though 0 is problematic without a counterproposal, I think)
If not...
Q: Why not?
Thanks,
-Brad
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