A quick opinion poll:
As some of you may know, I am working on enabling pointers to functions
(as opposed to closures, which we offer now). Such pointers will be
written `extern "ABI" fn(T) -> U`, where `ABI` is, well, the ABI that is
expected. This naming reflects the primary use for function pointers,
which is to interface with C libraries and the like. Extern fn pointers
*can* also be used to point to Rust functions.
To that end, I was wondering what the ABI names ought to be and whether
to make the ABI mandatory or supply a default.
Here are some options on the ABI names. Note that these names would
also appear in extern blocks (i.e., `pub extern "cdecl" { ... }`):
Option 1. Names "C", "Rust", "StdCall", etc.
Option 2. Names "C", "rust", "stdcall", etc.
Option 3. Names "cdecl", "rust", "stdcall", etc.
And here are the options on the default:
Option A. Mandatory ABI.
Option B. Default to "rust" (however it winds up being spelled)
Option C. Default to "cdecl" (however it winds up being spelled)
I am personally leaning towards options (3) and (C). The ABI names in
(3) seem most standard, and I imagine cdecl function pointers are the
most common. My only hesitation is that in C++ you mark C functions as
`extern "C" { ... }` not `extern "cdecl" {...}`, but as strcat pointed
out, this has to do more with name mangling than calling convention.
Niko
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