Examples

Creating ATS Interface for C Library

I did a zlog interface for ATS based on Zhiqiang Ren‘s work. You can access the code at GitHub. And here’s how I did it.

Getting Start

Download and install zlog, read its documents and interfaces, get familiar with it by writting some simple hello world in C.

Translate into a Minimum Workable ATS Interface

For a minimum hello world, we just write such a C program

int main () {
        zlog_init ("")
        zlog_category *c = zlog_get_category ("mycat");
        zlog (c, "%s", "hello world");
        zlog_fini ();
}

I consider the data structures first.

zlog_category * is used across interfaces, but I don’t care it’s inner structure, which means I can use an abstract type. It doesn’t need to be freed manually, instead, all resources are freed by zlog_fini (). Therefore I make it non-linear in ATS. It is a pointer in C, I then use boxed type in ATS.

Therefore, I can define zlog_category using abstype, which is abstract, non-linear, and boxed.

abstype zlog_category

For functions, we can translate them directly into ATS

fun zlog_init (config: string): int = "mac#zlog_init"
fun zlog_get_category (name: string): zlog_category = "mac#zlog_get_category"
fun zlog_fini (): void = "mac#zlog_fini"

The logging function zlog is tricky since it has variable length parameter list. What I do here is using an intermediate C function.

fun zlog {ts:types}
(c: zlog_category, level: int, fmt: string, args: ts): void =
"mac#zlog_handler"

And in the DATS file, I implement it as follows

#include "zlog.h"
#include <stdarg.h>

void zlog_handler (zlog_category *c, int level, char *fmt, ...) {
        va_list args;
        va_start (args, fmt);

        vzlog (
                c,
                __FILE__,
                sizeof(__FILE__) - 1,
                __func__,
                sizeof(__func__) - 1,
                __LINE__,
                level,
                fmt,
                args);

        va_end (args);
}

The vzlog is an alternative interface provided zlog itself. Most library interfaces will provide such an alternative besides its original variable length version.

And now we can use them to write the hello world example.

Refining Types

My initial type for zlog_category * is just workable. But now I wanna force programmers to check whether it is a null pointer before using it.

I then change the definition and interface to the followings.