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8.7 Alien Function Calls

The foreign function call interface allows a Lisp program to call functions written in other languages. The current implementation of the foreign function call interface assumes a C calling convention and thus routines written in any language that adheres to this convention may be called from Lisp.

Lisp sets up various interrupt handling routines and other environment information when it first starts up, and expects these to be in place at all times. The C functions called by Lisp should either not change the environment, especially the interrupt entry points, or should make sure that these entry points are restored when the C function returns to Lisp. If a C function makes changes without restoring things to the way they were when the C function was entered, there is no telling what will happen.

• The alien-funcall Primitive
• The def-alien-routine Macro
• def-alien-routine Example
• Calling Lisp from C
• Callback Example
• Accessing Lisp Arrays