Taking the defs file issue

[Christopher Browne]

On 12 Nov 2000 18:56:28 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>  said:
> 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.

The "guarantee of lack of danger" would be well and good as a
requirement if the bulk of the system were written in Scheme, and we
had a few bits of C tacked on the side.

Reality is that a sizable bulk of GnuCash is in C, which is one of the
ultimate examples of a system where errors can and do lead to memory
corruption and memory leaks.
--
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@ntlug.org") <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/>
"In my opinion MS is a lot better at making money than it is at making
good operating systems." -- Linus Torvalds