[Caml-list] Confusion about camlidl capabilities? other tools?

["Jeff Henrikson" <jehenrik@yahoo.com>]

Hi,

Reading the documentation of camlidl, it says that caml objects can be exported for use in C/C++ programs.  Looking at the source
code, the support for this looks minimal.  I see the camlidldll script, which is just a shell script that links a caml program with
some executable code.  If this is some sort of automatic dispatch interface generator, this is not what I want.  I want real C
header files from just plain unannotated mli.  Preferably a system with ability to map variants into C struct/unions coupled with
utility functions.  I'm not sure which other advanced ocaml datatypes I need beyond variants and the basic ints, strings, arrays
and etc.

Has anybody done something like this?  I ripped out the ocaml parser and started playing with it to build a tool, but I don't want
to be reinventing the wheel.  While I'm at it, I will probably try to export stubs at least these styles: COM, GTK-style C objects,
and SWIG-ready header files for inclusion in Python or TCL or whatever some unenlightened person would want to use.

I can't say how much I aprecate the simplicity of the ocamlc tools.  I would never have standalone compiled the parser for gcc into
any interesting form in 30 minutes.  Damn all the #ifdefs and sizeof(int) and other cruft of C culture.  And the caml language is
nice enough to where I'll actually be able to get a decent amount of the necessary behavior quickly.  A C abstract syntax tree
would be much less pleasant to deal with.


Thanks,


Jeff Henrikson

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