[Openmcl-devel] another make-record question

[Cyrus Harmon]

On Aug 20, 2004, at 9:16 AM, Gary Byers wrote:

> Consider a scenario where this is called in a standalone application.
> Should the author of that application be required to distribute the
> interface database with the application ?  (That's not illegal or
> immoral or anything, and to some extent it's also a rhetorical
> question.)

While the OpenMCL interface database stuff is incredibly cool and 
useful, this does bring up some issues that I've been grappling with a 
little bit. I've never really like the idea of "the interface 
database". Just for some background on what I've been doing, I've been 
trying to call the vImage framework from LISP code, with an eye towards 
other frameworks and libraries. One of the neater (to me) things I've 
discovered in doing this is that I don't need to go and much with "the 
interface database" and that through some clever usage of 
logical-pathnames and I can take my own .cdb files, place them wherever 
I need them and get the interface machinery to give me #_ and #$ access 
described by the .cdb files without having to touch the OpenMCL 
internals. Back to the somewhat rhetorical question. If we're going to 
require access to the shared library (of course) at runtime, is it 
really that much worse to require access to the .cdb files? This 
information has to live somewhere and it can either get compiled in via 
macro magic or we can distribute it with the application. Doesn't seem 
to make too much of a difference to me, as long as it con be 
distributed in a nice clean way.

There is another issue of efficiency in that we can get some of this 
stuff out of the way at compile-time, which is probably a good thing, 
but I go back to the idea of the registration at macro-expansion time 
as a way to do this.

Cyrus