Re: SLinC: scala <-> C interop powered by panama’s foreign

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

Hi Mark,
thanks for sharing this. I think this is a very cool example of building 
an interop layer (in a different language!) on top of the C linker API.

I like the way you used some of the "static" Scala features (such as 
macros) to make linking more succint (but w/o losing anything 
performance-wise).

Regarding structs, I believe at some point you might need some way to 
allow clients to specify custom layouts (e.g. in the presence of 
padding) - that's where things become a bit hairy for structs. In other 
words, the types of the declared fields (two Ints in this case) are not 
enough to fully specify the layout of the div_t struct. Perhaps this is 
something that can be fixed by adding some parameterization:

```
Struct[ div_tLayout ] {
    ...
} div_t
```

(Similarly to what you have done for linking functions). And, if you use 
some compact string representation for the layout, perhaps that's just a 
string:

```
Struct[ "[ b32(quot) b32(rem) ]" ] {
     val quot: int
     val rem: int
} div_t
```

But these are details, which I'm sure will be ironed out.

Cheers
Maurizio


On 08/11/2021 23:21, markehammons at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi all, I wanted to share with you a library I’m writing for Scala 3 called SLinC (Scala Link to C).
>
> https://gitlab.com/mhammons/slinc
>
> I’d like to thank the Panama team for their hard work. I was able to write this library and immediately see good performance out of it thanks to you. I’m hoping to refine and upgrade the library over this coming month, and I hope you all won’t mind if I ask for a bit of help or make suggestions now and then.
>
> Mark Edgar Hammons II