[Haskell-cafe] ANN: bindings-SDL 1.0.2, the domain specific language for FFI description

[Maurí­cio CA]

Hi,

This package is to be used with hsc2hs. (hsc2hs is called
automatically if you use Cabal.) It's a self-contained set of
macros used to create a Haskell wrap for a C interface. They
follow the idea that it's better to have a C-like wrap code
first and then write Haskell-like code on top of that than going
directly from C to Haskell style.

  Hackage link: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bindings-DSL
  Wiki documentation: http://bitbucket.org/mauricio/bindings-dsl

The fancy 'domain specific language' comes from 'binding-SDL'
macros hability to describe a C interface. Instead of writing
Haskell or preprocessor code, you can use 'bindings-DSL' macros
to describe the interface you want to wrap without knowledge of
how that description translates to preprocessor or Haskell code.
Suppose, for instance, you have the following C struct:

struct example_struct{
   int n;
   struct example_struct *p;
}

It will be described like this:

#starttype struct example_struct
#field n , CInt
#field p , Ptr <example_struct>
#stoptype

and this gives you a Haskell data type (automatically named
C'example_struct) with the same fields and Storable instantiation.

Here is a bigger example, with structs, macros, functions and
global variables. Suppose you want to wrap this:

    http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gsl.git/tree/multimin/gsl_multimin.h

Then this is how your 'bindings-DSL' code will look like:

    http://bitbucket.org/mauricio/bindings-gsl/src/tip/src/Bindings/Gsl/MultidimensionalMinimization.hsc

That code translates to these Haskell declarations:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bindings-gsl/0.1.1.6/doc/html/Bindings-Gsl-MultidimensionalMinimization.html

'bindings-DSL' came from previous 'bindings-common' package. It
started as an effort to have many Haskell interfaces to good
libraries available on Hackage, and came to be a language to
support writing such interfaces easily and reliably.

Hope it's usefull to you.

Best,
Maurício