Re: [Chicken-hackers] why Chicken?

[felix winkelmann]

On 1/31/07, Tony Sidaway <address@hidden> wrote:
> There should be a set of bindings for various native OS features.
> Staying in the Posix ghetto was an attractive option ten years ago
> when the most widely used version of Windows was little more than a
> toy, but if Chicken is to be useful for producing widely-used software
> that exploits the full capability of modern systems it must provide
> the kinds of interfaces that developers need, and that means more
> bindings to native features, in particular native Windows features and
> CLI (.Net) features.  If these were provided in eggs the clean
> simplicity of the core language implementation would not be affected.
> On the UNIX side, a similar lack of Gtk/Gnome bindings and the like
> makes Chicken programming quite hard work.  Similarly they need not
> concern Chicken's core.
>
> On .Net, I imagine that it may be possible to produce code that can
> handle managed CLI objects by compiling the C code using the managed
> C++ compiler.  It would be nice to see Chicken usable as a .Net
> language.  However the unusual stack management of Chicken may make
> this quite difficult or impossible to achieve.  Felix?

Everything you say is right, but the bottom line is: wrapping large APIs is
enormously mind-numbing and time-consuming work. Automatic "bulk"
wrapping is simply impossible with C/C++ APIs. SWIG comes close,
but you still have to do a lot of fine-tuning. So, unless someone is really
going to go through that (and has the knowledge of Chickens particular
quirks and implementation details) it's not going to happen. With funding,
perhaps, but not out of thin air. Someone has to do the job.

Basically, everything can be wrapped. Using CLI managed objects sounds
like its possible, but I don't know enough about .NET, and I'm likely not
going to learn a lot about it.


cheers,
felix