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Declarative Foreign Function Binding Through Generic Programming

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Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9613))

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Abstract

Foreign function interfaces are typically organised monolithically, tying together the specification of each foreign function with the mechanism used to make the function available in the host language. This leads to inflexible systems, where switching from one binding mechanism to another (say from dynamic binding to static code generation) often requires changing tools and rewriting large portions of code.

In contrast, approaching the design of a foreign function interface as a generic programming problem allows foreign function specifications to be written declaratively, with easy switching between a wide variety of binding mechanisms — static and dynamic, synchronous and asynchronous, etc. — with no changes to the specifications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are no calls to protect local variables from the GC because the code generator can statically determine that the GC cannot run during the execution of this function. However, it is not generally possible to determine whether the bound C function can call back into OCaml, and so the user must inform the code generator if such callbacks may occur by passing a flag to .

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Cambridge, UK

    Jeremy Yallop, David Sheets & Anil Madhavapeddy

Authors
  1. Jeremy Yallop
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  2. David Sheets
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  3. Anil Madhavapeddy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jeremy Yallop .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Oleg Kiselyov

  2. School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Andy King

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Yallop, J., Sheets, D., Madhavapeddy, A. (2016). Declarative Foreign Function Binding Through Generic Programming. In: Kiselyov, O., King, A. (eds) Functional and Logic Programming. FLOPS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9613. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29604-3_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29604-3_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29603-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29604-3

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