On Monday 25 July 2005 23:17, Luis Oliveira wrote:

=== Calling conventions

If I understand correctly, wrt C, the only calling convention issue is between 'cdecl' and 'stdcall' on win32. I suppose it would be nice not being required to specify this. (UFFI doesn't support stdcall at all).

Anyway, I noticed that Allegro doesn't require specifying cdecl vs. stdcall. I mailed Duane who quickly replied and explained to me that Allegro saves the stack pointer, and resets it after the call returns. That way, it'll work the same way whether it's the caller or the callee who is supposed to remove the arguments from the stack.

Do we want to add a new option to decfun for specifying the calling convention or do we want to convince/help the windows lisps to behave like Allegro? I think the Allegro approach is much better, and allows for more portable code between windows and unix.

I'm thinking the better thing to do here would be to work with the windows lisps - Camm at GCL camm@enhanced.com is always open to suggestions and will undoubtedly be delighted to hear you are working on a GCL port. I know less about Clisp's crew, but I think Sam Steingold sds@gnu.org is probably the man to talk to about that. ECL http://ecls.sourceforge.net/ also apparently works on Windows, and might be a very interesting test case as it a) compiles with the free Microsoft Visual C++ toolkit and b) has some sort of FFI based bridge to the Windows GUI libraries:

2005-06-08 04:41 Michael Goffioul has contributed a library for calling Microsoft Windows's GUI functions from ECL. The library uses ECL's own implementation of the UFFI (Unified Foreign Function Interface) and demonstrates that this is really usable. As examples, he has written both the typical button example and a small, single window text editor. You can find a screenshot at the project homepage (https://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=30035)

I don't know of any others offhand, but I would definitely advocate a) the Right approach and b) more portable code between Windows and unix. b) especially would be a Big Win.

Very exciting stuff!

Cheers, CY