Foreign functions and common Lisp

Abstract

The language Common Lisp is a standard dialect of Lisp which has been implemented on a wide range of machines by a variety of commercial and academic groups. One serious flaw in the Common Lisp standard, at least to many Common Lisp users on "general-purpose" hardware,1 is the lack of an defined foreign function interface, or FFI. The subject of this note is a discussion of FFI's for three different Common Lisp systems on engineering workstations and some thoughts on what foreign function interfaces ought to look like.