Re: Taking the defs file issue

[Tom Phillips <tsphillips at omeninc dot com>]

Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> Marius Vollmer <mvo@zagadka.ping.de> writes:
> 
> > I quite strongly disagree with this.  In my view, the functions
> > exported to the Scheme side must not be not be `dangerous' in the
> > sense that a pilot error can not lead to memory corruption, memory
> > leaks or similar.
> 
> Well, I suppose this depends on your perspective, and what you want.
> If you want to create a tool that lets you do from scheme the same
> things you can do from C with a given C API, and if you want to
> provide a way for people to *quickly* wrap *existing* C APIs without
> having to write a lot of additional glue code, then I think it's going
> to be *very* difficult to avoid the "dangerous" things you're talking
> about.

As someone who's been using guile and guile-gtk, I'd like to throw in my
two cents. When I write in Scheme it's for its characteristics as a
functional language. Any time I have to break down and resort to
procedural constructs, or rely exclusively on side effects, the language
loses some appeal. If I also needed to worry about memory allocation and
deallocation, I think I'd be better off using another language, such as
C, for example. I realize that I'm just one programmer, but I believe
Scheme's functional aspects are what make it a good choice for certain
applications.

Tom Phillips