I haven't used ATS, but I don't think it interops strongly. Hows does calling a ATS function with fancy typed arguments from C work?

My idea of strong interop is not having to write any glue code at all and being able to call any function. I assume there are some types that don't interface with C well.

That said, thanks for mentioning it. I should keep it in mind as it does do some of the stuff I want my language to.

Grep for "Exporting Types in ATS for Use in C" in http://ats-lang.sourceforge.net/DOCUMENT/INT2PROGINATS/HTML/...

    typedef
    struct {
       int atslab__0; void *atslab__1; 
    } int_and_string ;

very strong typing right there...

I apologize for being ambiguous. You wouldn't gain the benefits of ATS by interfacing with its C bindings from C. You would gain safety and security in interfacing with unsafe C on the ATS side through the ATS type system.

I was speaking about interfacing in the opposite direction.

> I apologize for being ambiguous.

No need to apologize. I also should have been more clear about what I meant by strong interoperability.

> I was speaking about interfacing in the opposite direction.

I think that having really strong interoperability requires both directions, but the being called from C is the one that is more restrictive on fancy types.

Unfortunately, C is C, and we all know what that means. Anything that achieves true type safety in both directions in going to be a monstrosity on the C side. Lots of boilerplate, marshalling of types, etc.

It all starts to look like COM, lol. Take care man.