Re: [Caml-list] Camlidl questions

[Chris Conway <cconway@courant.nyu.edu>]

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On Sat, 27 Oct 2007, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 27, 2007 at 10:43:46AM +0200, Daniel Bünzli wrote:
>> Le 26 oct. 07 à 22:36, Christopher L Conway a écrit :
>>> I'm trying to write an interface to an existing C library using
>>> Camlidl and I'm having trouble in just a few cases...
>>
>> I'd say don't use camlidl. It seems to be unsupported software. There
>> is for example a bug the handling of records of floats only that I
>> reported a long time ago but was lost in the bugtracker update. I
>> guess it wasn't fixed.
>>
>> Try to understand the caml-c interface (chap. 18 of the manual) and
>> then use C pre-processor hacks to streamline the development of your
>> bindings, have a look at lablgl to see what I mean by that.
>
> Absolutely agreed.
>
> While I think there is room for someone to _really_ tackle the issue
> of building interfaces to C automatically (using something like CIL
> and a bucket-load of meta-information about how the C library deals
> with memory), until that day comes it's just much better to write the
> bindings by hand.
>
> I've used the native interface APIs for several languages including
> Java, Perl and Python, but OCaml's is by far the easiest.  Well, maybe
> apart from C++ :-)
>
> Rich.

I'm afraid I don't understand this position at all. With a few dozen, 
mostly obvious, annotations to the header files, I have covered 99% of the 
library's functionality, automatically generating several thousand lines 
of low-level boilerplate code. Leaving aside the possibility of known bugs 
in Camlidl that might never get fixed... why would I want to code this all 
by hand?

Regards,
Chris