FFI question -- was: [Haskell-cafe] New slogan for haskell.org

[Steve Lihn]

On Dec 11, 2007 11:16 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> >    2. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools
> >    (FFI? Is the support strong?)
>
>    2. The FFI in Haskell is perhaps the most powerful out there.
>       You can import C or export Haskell to C with a single line FFI decl.
>
Don,
I am a newbie on FFI, but have been interested in looking into it. If
I google on "haskell FFI", what I find is typically:
1. The official Haskell 98 FFI 1.0
2. The FFI preprocessor -- greencard on haskell.org, where several
other preprocessors are listed (in the Link section): HaskellDirect, C
to Haskell, hsc2hs (included in GHC distributions), QForeign, KDirect.

The FFI 1.0 API is certainly the most robust tool. However, the
existence of preprocessors seem to suggest (at least very enticing)
that the use of a preprocessor would make life easier.

But when I dig deeper, several of them have not had any release in
(more than) 3 years. The only exception seem to be "C to Haskell",
which is part of gtk2hs, and hsc2hs, being part of GHC. It immediately
becomes confusing which tool I should use if I were to work on a FFI
project... Can you shed some light on this?

Thanks, Steve