On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Sven Panne wrote:
Did you have a look at the FFI draft http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi.ps.gz
I just read this paper. It seems to focus on local interfaces rather than on interfaces that will also work accross network connections. A modern FFI interface should offer both transparent object serialization (like Java, but readable) and interfaces that work between programs running on different machines (RPC). MIME provides the infrastructure required for doing so. It defines both a serialization format and a public type system that individual languages may support in different ways. MIME is already in use in millions of web applications and web browsers. I've tried to document its use as an FFI at MIME-RPC.com (and created a discussion group for MIME-RPC related issues at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mime-rpc). I had been thinking of it as a system for inter-process messaging (as well as object serialization), and created an implementation in Python for doing so. However, there are no Haskell or C implementations yet. I would welcome thoughts from people here on how to do both efficiently and how to use such implementations for in-process communication as well as network communication. -Alex- PS Dave Winer's Scripting.com just picked up MIME-RPC so I think the idea is gaining some traction. ___________________________________________________________________ S. Alexander Jacobson i2x Media 1-212-787-1814 voice 1-603-288-1280 fax