Re: How close to C do you make your binding?

[Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@...>]

On Wednesday, June 18, 2014, Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 11:03 AM, steve donovan
> <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> > To stick to the original API is missing an opportunity to make that
> > API better and more accessible to others. It's a common strategy to do
> > a minimal binding (or use FFI) and then build something more elegant
> > on top of that.
>
> The context of the discussion IS said minimal binding to build on top of.
>
> I will point out that such syntactic points as multiple return values
> and error handling are also the kinds of changes I'd do; I'd
> overlooked those in my discussion because usually I'm working with
> stuff that's already object-oriented instead of idiomatic C and
> therefore those considerations aren't nearly as necessary.
>
> /s/ Adam

Thank you. This was the heart of the question. We're writing a very Lua-esque API and exposing the "core" object inside. Our goal was: as little C as possible. 

I wanted to know if others were writing the "core" layer so that all of the function arguments and return values matched, whenever possible, with the idea being that *any* inconsistency would be a burden. For example, accepting "0" from the C function, when the Lua equivalent would return something "false-y"

It sounds like doing the easy things that don't create a lot of C code is more common. 

-Andrew