[Haskell-cafe] Re: HOC is dead! Long live HOC!

[Wolfgang Thaller]

On 7-Nov-07, at 5:14 PM, Joel Reymont wrote:

> BridgeSupport [1] is new functionality in Leopard that makes the  
> current Haskell Objective-C bindings (HOC) obsolete (almost).

"Almost" here means about five to ten percent of the code ;-). If the  
BridgeSupport files really contain all the information we need, then  
we can indeed drop the Objective-C parsing code from HOC and use a  
BridgeSupport parser instead.
Unfortunately, that parser itself is less than 500 lines out of 7000  
(in the HOC library and the InterfaceGenerator taken together). But  
the sheer beauty of having someone else maintain the parser for us  
should make it worthwhile.

One big piece of information we need that is currently missing from  
the BridgeSupport files is which declaration comes form which header  
file. HOC's module structure currently follows Apple's .h files, and  
we need the module system for resolving naming ambiguities. So either  
we need to change that, or we need to get the information from  
elsewhere. There might be other small things missing, we'll have to  
carefully look at the details.

> [...] It's no longer necessary to bundle libffi with HOC either  
> since Leopard comes with a much improved version.

Yes, that's one great little addition to Mac OS X :-).

> I hereby propose to close up the old HOC project on SourceForge and  
> set up a new one at GoogleCode. I already did this but GoogleCode  
> noticed the SF project and is now waiting for permission from  
> Wolfgang and Andre.

I haven't had a chance recently to do a thorough comparison of  
different open source hosting providers, so I have no opinion on this  
one. So if you want to invest time in maintaining HOC, and you want to  
maintain it on GoogleCode, then so be it. How do I give my permission?


Cheers,

Wolfgang