[Nickle] Currency conversion (foreign function interface)

[Keith Packard]

Around 7 o'clock on Dec 6, Bart Massey wrote:

> Huh.  I thought the FFI plan was to be able to do some
> extern "C" equivalent...

Yeah, would be nice, but that's a large stack of work, and I don't know 
exactly how it would work.  It's the structured datatypes which seem 
hardest to unravel.

Plus, I'm not sure it's really all that much easier to write these by hand 
in nickle than in C.  Something which did this automatically from a header 
file, perhaps with a bit of prompting from the user would be even nicer.

> Only problem is that now you have to make some chunk of the Nickle
> compiler understand handling C-style arguments.  Some of the machinery is
> already there from the builtin stuff

The builtin stuff demands that the C code itself perform the nickle->C 
representation conversions.  There isn't any automated mechanism here.

Right now, I'm interested in getting the machinery for actually calling 
the functions with the right datatypes working, I think that's a big 
enough piece that working on that and ignoring the stub generation until 
later makes some sense.

-keith


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