Hi Mark! Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> writes:
> l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes: >> OK. I was thinking that I’d use C when dealing with fixnums or floats, >> and let Guile manage bignums and similar—in which case writing C doesn’t >> seem to help much. >> >> Do you think there are use cases for using this interface from C? [...] > Put another way: these functions are useful for the same reasons that > that GMP is useful for more than just writing interpreters. Yes, some > people want to write the bulk of their code in C, even when they are > using such features. OK, fair enough. I think I’ve already sufficiently distracted you, and I’m fine with you committing the patch (and after all, we’re talking of one C function.) > We cannot force people to use Scheme. If we wish for libguile to be > attractive for use by projects primarily written in C, we ought to > extinguish this unfortunate recent tendency to say "people ought to be > writing Scheme not C", and we ought to stop using that as an excuse to > block improvements to the C interface. It’s become our motto! :-) I don’t want to block improvements to the C interface, and I agree that this convenient C interface has been one of Guile’s strengths, which we should keep. But I wouldn’t want them to block improvements to the Scheme implementation. First, maintaining the compatibility of C functions can be hard, at least harder than maintaining a Scheme interface because Scheme has optional arguments and so on. Second, the C interface can expose details that hinder improvements of the Scheme implementation—e.g., ‘scm_values’, dynamic-winds, etc. Thanks, Ludo’.
