Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Future of ExtLib

[<syl...@po...>]

Hello,

On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 12:33:12PM -0500, Brian Hurt wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> 
> No, the problems I have with this idea are:
> 
> 1) You'd still have C dependencies, breaking the Ocaml-only nature of 
> ExtLib.
> 
> 2) You would still have to deal with impedence mismatches- C API's that
> don't translate well into Ocaml.  For example, routines which take
> pointers to variables to return more than one value.  Or APIs that depend 
> upon the "shape" of variables (for example, using unions).  Or that want 
> to use Macros to inline code.  I'm not sure what all the impedence 
> problems might be.
> 

Even if i am not an Extlib developper, i permit myself to raise my
voice... Sorry if you don't agree.

I think extlib is a great project by the 100% Pure Ocaml coding style. I
think putting 1 byte of C in it is not a good idea. It will break a lot
of things, need to be maintained over a lot of arch ( including Ms Win,
Linux, Unix, Irix et al ). I think it is far too complicated to be
interessant.

My opinion, is that you can create a new repository especially for
project related to extlib... It will be far more simple, and will gives
dependency on C only on this external module. Just to give you an
example : 
CVSROOT/
extlib/
extlib-io-zip/
extlib-io-aes/
...

I think it is the less complicated you can do...
Off course, the compilation will require to load other module than
extlib, but i think it is worth the effort.

Thank you for reading
Kind regard
Sylvain Le Gall