[racket] CoreMIDI bindings

On 07/21/2010 12:51 PM, Evan Hanson wrote:
> In an effort to learn scheme, I ported some bindings for a subset of
> the OS X CoreMIDI API from a Ruby project of mine to scheme/foreign.
> I'm posting them (a) in case anyone wants to use them, but more
> because (b) I'm hoping for some feedback. I'm sure there are places
> where I could have done things better, more idiomatically, etc. Any
> advice is appreciated (but file this one under "non-emergency").

A couple thoughts:

1) Use provide/contract for your library's entry points. Besides making
your library safer to use, they act as a basic kind of documentation.
Also, using contracts in this program will be a little lesson in name
management: ffi/unsafe and racket/contract have different bindings for
->, so you'll need to prefix or rename one of them. E.g.,
  (require (rename-in racket/contract [-> c->]))

2) Consider using tagged pointers instead of just _pointer. For example,
you could turn this:

  (define midi-get-destination
    (ffi-load "MIDIGetDestination"
              (_fun _item-count    ; returns a
                    -> _pointer))) ; MIDIEndPointRef *

into this:

  (define-cpointer-type _midi-end-point-ref)
  ...
  (define midi-get-destination
    (ffi-load "MIDIGetDestination"
              (_fun _item-count -> _midi-end-point-ref)))

(That is, if I remember how tagged pointers work correctly.)

And then by all means put it up on planet.racket-lang.org!

Ryan


> Also, is this the kind of thing that should be namespaced? In
> contrast to other languages where namespacing is used heavily
> (sometimes even to a fault), it seems that many scheme libraries are
> quite flat. Is this simply left up to the user to manage, or does the
> module system take care of this, or is there something else I'm
> missing altogether? Forgive the naïveté if this should be clear to
> me.