Koen Claessen
Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
| I don't think that it makes much sense coding on the | plain FFI unless there are reasons for avoiding an | extra tool or the binding is very small.
Just my $0.02:
I have used the plain FFI for larger projects. The initial reason I did this because my version of H/Direct stopped working after I switched to a newer GHC, and I did not feel like trying to fix it (again), or install a new tool. So, I was forced to use the plain FFI.
I found it delightfully simple! [..] One more note I like to make: Using H/Direct (and no doubt any of the other tools as well), I find that one ends up writing a wrapper module anyway, which gives the library in question a more Haskell-like interface (types, function names, order of arguments, extra polymorphism wrappers, runST-like tricks, etc.) The amount of work involved removing the extra (automatic) layer is about the same as the amount of work trying to make the interface compatible
I agree completely - except that in C->Haskell (and also hsc2hs) you do *not* have to write that extra layer. Or to be precise, you do it in one go. This was one of the main design goals in C->Haskell. You may know that when I started on Gtk+HS, I used the same approach as you (for similar reasons as you do). After many lines of code, I found that it works nice that way, but there are a couple of things which when automated would save quite same work. So, I automated just these piece, the rest is still just verbatim Haskell code doing the marshalling. Cheers, Manuel