[Johnny_Brahms]

I feel that not standardising a low level FFI for r7rs large is a mistake. They should at least recommend some reasonably low level stuff that can be used to build abstractions.

[cat199]

Agree with the sentiment, but at the same time understand the rationale - FFI implies alot of GC/memory internal interfacing stuff, and to some extent expects a c-based implementation (not e.g. JVM,CLR,etc).

If r7 & library interface are widely adopted, some flavors of FFI could evolve within the library/srfi process and gradually become defacto standards..

Probably hoping too much.. but in any event..

[dleslie]

That didn't happen with R5RS, why would it happen now?

Face it, by refusing to be opinionated they ensured Scheme will remain a toy.

[Johnny_Brahms]

Because r7rs large is an effort that probably is bigger than common lisp. It is very much not a toy language.

[dleslie]

If it doesn't have an ffi it will remain a toy that relies on implementations to make it useful.

[Johnny_Brahms]

I think that the best way to go about it (at least if you want to be successful) would be to write a SRFI that could easily be impkemented using the FFIs that are already out there.

Managing that, but still being flexible enough to be useful, is a huge amount of work, at least if you want to do more than just "call this c function".