Re: on coding a portable R6RS package supporting Guile and its FFI

[Andy Wingo]

On Thu 17 Jan 2013 11:53, Marco Maggi <address@hidden> writes:

> * Whenever  a callout  to C  accepts a  pointer argument:  a
>   bytevector argument  is rejected.   Is this not  a useless
>   complication?
>
>   One   can    work   around   it   by    explicitly   using
>   BYTEVECTOR->POINTER, so everything is ready in Guile.  The
>   other  Scheme   implementations  using   a  non-compacting
>   garbage collector already support  this feature and I find
>   it truly convenient.

I agree that we would do well to allow bytevectors wherever an argument
type is a pointer.  It avoids an allocation in a very common case
without changing the expressiveness of the interface or adding
significant additional overhead.

Ludovic sounded like he could go either way on this point.  Daniel
brought up the argument that "a bytevector is not a pointer"; but for
many purposes it's not a terrible thing to think of it that way.  IMHO.

Andy
-- 
http://wingolog.org/