Re: on coding a portable R6RS package supporting Guile and its FFI

[Ludovic Courtès]

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:

> I agree that we would do well to allow bytevectors wherever an argument
> type is a pointer.  It avoids an allocation in a very common case
> without changing the expressiveness of the interface or adding
> significant additional overhead.

I find it somewhat inelegant, though.

This would be less of a problem if we had “immediate pointers” [0].
Would the retagging in 2.1 allow this?

(At FOSDEM, Luca Saiu rightfully noted that we could use 4-bit tags
instead of 3-bit tags on 64-bit arches, which would give us the needed
room here.)

Ludo’.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2011-01/msg00159.html