FFI progress

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

"Simon Peyton-Jones" <simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote,

> | In case you aren't aware of this, Windows DLL's by default, (actually
> | always, as far as I know) use the stdcall (Pascal) calling convention.
> | 
> | I personally hope that you won't drop anything which facilitates using
> | Haskell under Windows.
> 
> Dead right.  I wasn't proposing removing the functionality, just
> changing
> how to get at it.  More concretely, there are two alternatives
> 
> 1.  Treat C-via-stdcall and C-via-ccall as two different "languages".
> 	E.g. 
> 		foreign import "C/stdcall" "gtk:foo" foo :: Int -> IO
> Int
> 
> 2.  Treat C as one language, but put the calling convention into the
> language
> specific string.  E.g.
> 		foreign import "C" "stdcall/ gtk:foo" foo :: Int -> IO
> Int
> 
> 
> I prefer (1) but it's not a big deal.  

I think, it was Malcolm who earlier argued that we shouldn't
have a language C, but rather name it ccall, because what we
really are after is the calling convention and not the
implementation language of an external function.  I would
regard this as an argument in favour of (1).  

BTW, We can't use "C/ccall" and "C/stdcall", as we decided
to not use a string, but a pseudo identifier to select the
language or rather calling convention.  So, it would be

  foreign import ccall "gtk:foo" foo :: Int -> IO

In this context, I actually find it the identifier `stdcall'
strange.  Why is it standard?  I'd argue that ccall is the
standard (in fact, it so far was the default, wasn't it?)

Any suggestions for a better name?  Technically, it should
be `pascal' shouldn't it?  Is it good for anything, but
calling Win32?  Are there maybe Pascal compilers that use
it?  If so, `pascal' would make sense.  Otherwise, we might
use `wincall'.  That's not really nice, but better than
`stdcall', I think.

If nobody comes up with a serious reason why we shouldn't,
I'll fix it to be 

  foreign import ccall "gtk:foo" foo :: Int -> IO

and

  foreign import XYZ "whatever:foo" foo :: Int -> IO

where XYZ is `pascal' or `wincall' depending on what gets
more support. 

Cheers,
Manuel