Summary of current change suggestions

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

"Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk" <mk167280 at zodiac.mimuw.edu.pl> wrote,

> On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> 
> > OK, now how about things where you need to #define symbols before
> > including the header file?
> 
> Choose one:
> 1. Write a forwarding header which #defines and #includes.

That's exactly the way to do it.

> 3. Extend the proposed FFI to have define as well as include.

We can't extend the FFI to implement half the features of
all the language we want to bind to.  I agree with Alastair
and SimonPJ that we have reached the maximum in add on
features to Haskell for supporting foreign bindings.  I am
happy about any change that makes things more orthogonal or
so, but I don't think we should add any more features
without simplyfing something or taking something else out.

> Unfortunately option 1 doesn't always work well on ghc, because Stg.h
> (included into .hc files) indirectly includes headers like <stdlib.h> 
> *before* user-specified -#include options, so symbols like _BSD_SOURCE
> are defined too late to have any effects. This should be fixed.

Yes, but it's an implementation problem, not one of the FFI.

> hsc2hs provides a mix of option 1 and option 2. You write #define in .hsc
> source before #include and it usually works, but sometimes it's too late.
> I hope this mess can be somewhat sorted out; symbols go into several
> files and it is messy.
> 
> > Or where the header file to include varies depending on the system?
> 
> When you have conditional compilation (either via hsc2hs or via cpp),
> wrap the proposed 'foreign default include "..."' in appropriate #ifdefs.

Yep - tool support is of course fine, too.

Cheers,
Manuel