ml-nlffigen - SML No Longer Foreign Function Interface tool

ml-nlffigen [option] -- file

This manual page documents briefly the ml-nlffigen command. This manual page was written for the Debian distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.

ml-nlffigen, a glue-code generator for the new NLFFI foreign function interface. The generator reads C source code and emits ML code along with a description file for CM.

A summary of options is included below.

-dir dir

-d d Output directory where all generated files are placed. default: NLFFI-Generated.

-allSU Instructs ml-nlffigen to include all structs and unions, even those that are defined in included files (as opposed to files explicitly listed as arguments). default: off.

-width w

-w w Sets output line width (just a guess) to w. default: 75.

-smloption x Instructs ml-nlffigen to include x into the list of options to annotate .sml entries in the generated .cm file with. default: noguid.

-guid Removes the default -noguid from the list of sml options. (This re-enables strict handling of type- and object-identity but can have negative impact on CM cutoff recompilation performance if the programmer routinely removes the entire tree of ml-nlffigen-generated files during development.)

-lambdasplit x

-ls x Instructs ml-nlffigen to generate "lambdasplit" options for all ML files (see CM manual for what this means; it does not currently work anyway because cross-module inlining is broken). default: nothing.

-target t

-t t Sets the target to t (which must be one of "sparc-unix","x86-unix", or "x86-win32"). default: current architecture.

-light

-l Suppress "heavy" versions of function wrappers and field accessors; also resets any earlier -heavy to default. default: not suppressed.

-heavy

-h suppress "light" versions of function wrappers and field accessors; also resets any earlier -light to default. default: not suppressed

-namedargs

-na Instruct ml-nlffigen to generated function wrappers that use named arguments (ML records) instead of tuples if there is enough information for this in the C source; (this is not always very useful). default: off.

-nocollect Do not do the following: Collect enum constants from truly unnamed enumerations (those without tags that occur at toplevel or in an unnamed context, i.e., not in a typedef or another named struct or union) into a single artificial enumeration tagged by ' (single apostrohe). The corresponding ML-side representative will be a structure named E_'.

-enum-constructors

-ec When possible (i.e., if all values of a given enumeration are different from each other), make the ML representation type of the enumeration a datatype. The default (and fallback) is to make that type the same as MLRep.Signed.int.

-libhandle h

-lh h Use the variable h to refer to the handle to the shared library object. Given the constraints of CM, h must have the form of a long ML identifier, e.g., MyLibrary.libhandle.default:Library.libh.

-include f

-add f Mention file f in the generated .cm file. This option is necessary at least once for providing the library handle. It can be used arbitrarily many times, resulting in more than one such programmer-supplied file to be mentioned. If f is relative, then it must be relative to the directory specified in the -dir dir option.

-cmfile f

-cm f Specify name of the generated .cm file, relative to the directory specified by the -dir dir option. default: nlffi-generated.cm.

-cppopt o The string o gets added to the list of options to be passed to cpp (the C preprocessor). The list of options gets substituted for %o in the cpp command line template.

-U x The string -Ux gets added to the list of cpp options.

-D x The string -Dx gets added to the list of cpp options.

-I x The string -Ix gets added to the list of cpp options.

-version Just write the version number of ml-nlffigen to standard output and then quit.

-match r

-m r Normally ml-nlffigen will include ML definitions for a C declaration if the C declaration textually appears in one of the files specified at the command line. Definitions in #include-d files will normally not appear (unless their absence would lead to inconsistencies). By specifying -matchr , ml-nlffigen will also include definitions that occur in recursively #include-d files for which the awk-style regular expression r matches their names.

-prefix p

-p p Generated ML structure names will all have prefix p (in addition to the usual "S_" or "U_" or "F_" ...)

-gensym g

-g g Names "gensym-ed" by ml-nlffigen (for anonymous struct/union/ enums) will get an additional suffix _g. (This should be used if output from several indepdendent runs of ml-nlffigen are to coexist in the same ML program.)

-- Terminate processing of options, remaining arguments are taken to be C sources.

sml(1), ml-build(1).

This program described in more detail in No-Longer-Foreign: Teaching an ML compiler to speak C , Matthias Blume, which is available via <http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/blume/papers/nlffi.pdf>.

This manual page was written by Aaron Matthew Read <amread@nyx.net>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).