[wg-camlp4] Extension developers: we need you!

[Wojciech Meyer]

Hi Alain,

I did consider already early testing of your branch, and even write some
code to try it. Currently out of power to do this, because loads of work
at the moment. I can however uncover what can be done with the
extension_points. So the idea wast to write FFI bindings generator using
the attributes to generate needed meta information for this
purpose. Because everybody knows, that generating FFI is possible in
most cases, and most likely you will look at architecture of Haskell's
"greencard" tool [1], you will find you really want to annotate the
ml/mli files, and generate both implementation files and C files from
it. This is nice trade of versus ocaml-idl, that have a separate DSL
(and btw, we should really use this tool when it's possible and I do
consider reusing some of the code out there). This reduces burden of
implementing all this boilerplate, but I'm not convinced yet if that
will work in all the cases that should be considered. (the interesting
one are for instance closures callable from C and exceptions).

[1] http://www.haskell.org/nhc98/greencard.html

Alain Frisch <alain.frisch at lexifi.com> writes:

> Now is a good time to start collecting more concrete feedback from
> extension developers on the current proposal (ppx +
> extension_points). Are there people on this list interested in porting
> their existing extensions (or other tools which can benefit from
> attributes)?   This will be greatly helpful if the current design can
> be validated by real extension developers.  Porting real extensions
> will also help to isolate a good set of "convenience" functions to
> build or deconstruct AST fragments in a light way.
>
> (Disclaimer: there will still be some more cleanups to the Parsetree
> definition and helper modules (Ast_mapper, Ast_helper), so the code
> written now will need to be adjusted for the final version, but I
> expect those changes to be quite easy.)
>
>
> -- Alain
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--
Wojciech Meyer
http://danmey.org