On Thu, 2006-02-09 at 09:27 -0800, Donn Cave wrote:
On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Christopher Brown wrote:
Frederico,
Have you tried using Green Card?
It is basically a foreign function pre-processor for Haskell. It allows your Haskell programs to interface with C libraries in a very straight forward way.
I tried it, and managed to get it working to some extent. Then I found out about hsc2hs and the current FFI support in ghc, and I noticed that according to http://www.haskell.org/greencard/ , the current version of Green Card is an alpha release from 2003.
From comparison of the two, my impression is that this parrot is dead, and everyone is just too polite to say so. Unfortunately, this inability to pull the shades on Green Card, Haskell Direct, etc., takes away a little from ghc's outstanding FFI.
There is also c2hs which is well supported and is used for several large C bindings: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/c2hs/ It works at a higher level than hsc2hs and can make writing bindings quite a bit simpler and cleaner. For example the cairo bindings use it: http://darcs.haskell.org/gtk2hs/cairo/Graphics/Rendering/Cairo/ see the various .chs files, for example: http://darcs.haskell.org/gtk2hs/cairo/Graphics/Rendering/Cairo/Internal/Draw... Duncan