Re: [Chicken-hackers] why Chicken?

[Tony Sidaway]

On 1/31/07, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:

> I see two approaches:
>
> - a recruitment strategy that attracts massively more open source
> developers to Chicken.  So that we get out of the tens and into the
> hundreds of developers.  If I had an entire team working on build
> issues, we wouldn't have any build problems, and nobody would be doing a
> ton of boring build work.
>
> - a brilliant technology that automates binding work.

Failing the latter, I don't think the former is likely to happen until
we have basic pre-packaged bindings for many of the things that
developers want to do.

Writing bindings is easy for small scale tasks such as wrapping a
single medium sized C library.  For anything larger, it's non-trivial
even with the foreign code interface and/or SWIG.  We should encourage
all regular chicken developers to release eggs for the common binding
tasks (we've already had huge success but there is always more to do).

On the core language, it might be nice to have constructs capable of
handling the most common instances of C variable length argument
lists.  I'm aware that there are some fundamental C implementation
dependencies here but if SWIG can do it (badly) it ought to be
possible to encapsulate the basics in a manner flexible enough to be
used in hand coding.