ANN: Hacanon 0.1

Lemmih lemmih at gmail.com
Mon Feb 21 00:43:18 EST 2005


What is Hacanon?

Hacanon is a Template Haskell library which automates the process of
binding Haskell to libraries written in C++. It's designed to capture
common patterns and allow the programmer to specify the desired
behaviour accordingly.
Hacanon is capable of generating a usable binding, without any
interaction, to almost any piece of C++. This binding is of relatively
high level, because Hacanon translates enumerations to Haskell data
structures, has transparent callback support and overloads every
function. Unfortunately, such a binding would, in most cases, be
flawed. Is 'int*' an array, variable which holds a second result or
something third?
Here Hacanon provides a data interface scheme (aka DIS) system which
allows the programmer to concisely describe how an argument should be
handled. DISs can be derived from other DISs because they're nothing
more than data structures. This gives rise to increased code reuse and
minimizes the burden on the programmer. These DISs can be used in the
appliance system where the programmer can guard on function name (via
regex), argument type and argument number.

Some of the features sound familiar. Is Hacanon related to GreenCard or HDirect?

I've borrowed the DIS concept from GreenCard and directional
arguments from HDirect. I would like to think I've taken the best of
both worlds and added some innovation in form of automation.

Dependencies:
  * Recent version of GHC. Tested with ghc-6.4.20050209 and
ghc-6.4.20050219. http://www.haskell.org/ghc
  * HaXml 1.12. http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/HaXml/
  * GCCXML from CVS hacked to include template information. Hack is
distributed with Hacanon.

Author and availability:

Hacanon is written by David Himmelstrup and published under a
MIT-style license.
Darcs repository: http://www.scannedinavian.org/repos/hacanon/

--
Friendly,
  Lemmih


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