[m-dev.] documenting parts of Mercury's C runtime interface

[Paul Bone]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 11:11:52AM +1100, Julien Fischer wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Most Mercury bindings to C (or C++) libraries need to make some use of the
> facilities provided by the runtime, e.g. for memory allocation in C code 
> using
> the GC, making aligned string copies, or extracting an underlying C file
> stream from a Mercury one.
> 
> Currently, none of this stuff is really documented outside of runtime
> code itself.  For most of the runtime this is desirable since we want
> the freedom to change it without respect to backwards compatability,
> but some usage of the runtime functionality has become some prevalent
> in library bindings and other code that makes heavy use of the C interface
>  that it really does need to be documented properly.
> 
> Should this be done in the reference manual, the user's guide, or a separate
> guide to the runtime?  Which would people prefer?

As others have said the reference manual is about the language.  I would
recommend the user's guide or a new "foreign language interface guide"
which may contain information for different backends.


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