Re: [Sml-implementers] extensions to SML: Foreign functioninterface

[Matthias B. <bl...@re...>]

Dave Berry wrote:
> 
> At 21:29 17/09/2001, David Matthews wrote:
> >Dave,
> >Have you looked at the foreign function interface that Nick Chapman did
> >for Poly/ML several year ago? (See
> >http://www.lfcs.ed.ac.uk/software/polyml/docs/CInterface.html ).  It's
> >been used for several projects but particularly the Windows interface
> >which has several hundred functions in it.  It works for dynamic
> >libraries in Unix or DLLs in Windows and doesn't require the SML
> >programmer to write anything but ML.
> 
> I haven't looked at it recently, although I think we looked at it when we
> were working on the MLWorks FLI.  I'm about to go on holiday, but I'll look
> at it when I get back.

I would, perhaps somewhat selfishly, like to point people to our new "NLFFI"
foreign function interface for C.  I will make documentation for it available
soon, for the time being here is a longer draft of the text of my BABEL'01 paper
that describes the ideas (for those who haven't seen it yet):

  http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/blume/nlffi.ps

The ideas should be readily translatable to most ML implementations (and even
to other languages with HM-type systems and ML-like abstraction facilities).

Matthias