Typing f.e.d.

[Simon Marlow]

> What libraries is the evolving design being tried out on (I 
> know about your
> OpenGL library).

In GHC we have implementations of Directory, Time and CPUTime using the
new FFI and hsc2hs.  The new implementations should work on Hugs with
only minor tweaks, given suitable implementations of the FFI libraries.

I'm hoping at some point to write a portable implementation of IO using
the new FFI.

> 1) As a user, I only _have_ to use the low level ffi 
> libraries: Addr, Word,
>    Int64, ForeignObj, etc.   Its nice if the high level 
> libraries are useful
>    too but not essential.
> 
> 2) As an ffi implementer/maintainer, I only have to implement 
> the agreed
>    ffi interface and all the libraries on top will "just work".
> 
> 3) They're not supposed to be standard so it's ok to 
> experiment with the
>    design a bit.

The libraries *are* part of the standard.  The FFI language extensions
are just one part of the propsed FFI standard; the low and high-level
marshalling libraries form the other part.

Cheers,
	Simon