Re: The future: accessing vectors, arrays, etc from C

[Neil Jerram]

Marius Vollmer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after some procrastination, I have more or less convinced myself to
> make accessing vectors and arrays (including uniform numeric vectors
> and arrays) more difficult from C.  Here is how and why.  Please
> comment!

Hi Marius,

Apologies for the slow response on this.  In general I think your 
proposal looks good, but I have two points to raise for consideration.

Firstly, I recall an old discussion between Jim and Mikael about a 
"leasing" interface in this area, which struck me at that time as very 
elegant.  I've not analysed how close it is to your thoughts, or how 
relevant it might be, but I thought you might like to review that and 
consider whether it affects your thinking at all.  The URLs of two 
relevant messages are:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/guile/1999-01/msg00093.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/guile/1999-01/msg00109.html

Secondly, I am slightly concerned about the level of change that this 
means in the C API.  Actually, to be precise, I'm not sure I'm bothered 
about the level of change per se, as I believe the current reality is 
that a Guile application writer has no choice but to select an available 
major version of Guile (e.g. 1.6) and to target their application at 
specifically that version; and fortunately the bugs in Guile are few 
enough that it is feasible to stick with an older version.

However, I wonder if perhaps we should have a more explicit and public 
policy on the level of change that is (i) acceptable and (ii) likely, 
from one major release to the next, so that developers know what to expect?

What do you (and everyone else) think?

Regards,
        Neil