Excerpts from John A. De Goes's message of Thu Jan 08 12:14:18 -0600 2009:
But really, what's the point? FFI code is fragile, often uncompilable and unsupported, and doesn't observe the idioms of Haskell nor take advantage of its powerful language features.
This is a completely unfair generalization. The FFI is an excellent way to interoperate with an extraordinary amount of external libraries, and if you ask me, it's *worth* taking those pieces of C code and wrapping them up in a nice, safe haskell interface. I will also mention that Haskell has *the* simplest FFI I have ever used, which to me only means it's easier to get it right (the fact that there are customized *languages* like e.g. cython to make writing python extensions easier makes me wonder.) I suggest you take a look at the haskell llvm bindings - they are extraordinarily well documented, and the high level interface uses *many* haskell idioms that make the library safe and easy to use: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/llvm-0.4.2.0 This code most certainly takes advantage of powerful features and idioms that only Haskell can provide. Please do not take your bad experiences with a few crappy binding (or not even crappy bindings, perhaps bindings that just aren't very abstract) and extend them to the bindings that are excellent with a sweeping statement like that. Austin