ORBit (was Re: * mico)

[Elliot Lee <sopwith cuc edu>]

On Thu, 19 Feb 1998, Philip Dawes wrote:

> We *still* need somebody to write the scheme bindings. Any takers? 
> 
> As far as I know, Elliot is looking into doing C bindings to omniorb
> (since this is much faster than mico and the two interoperate well), and
> Owen Taylor is playing with perl bindings for mico.

OmniORB is out of the picture because the consensus among others was to
use Mico for C bindings (Mico has features that OmniORB is lacking).

While I do plan on releasing a play version of C bindings for Mico, it
will be a hack. The GIMP people also will be needing an ORB in the future
to replace the pdb, and do not really want to require C++ to use the
Gimp.

So, I think we need to write a nice ORB from scratch in C, to be a
language independant ORB, with all the features (DII, DSI, Any type,
client-side IR support) needed to make it usable from scripting languages.
We could aim for C, Scheme, and ObjC bindings to start with, then go on as
needed.

We can reuse some code from existing projects - for example, the IDL
compiler can be the standard OMG one with a plugin backend for our ORB.
The Interface Repository used can be the one in mico.

>From scratch, we would need to implement:
	The basic ORB itself
		(de)marshalling of all the types
		The core ORB functions
		IIOP
	The backend for the IDL compiler
	The BOA
		Shared library, persistent, and dynamic activation

We would, of course, have the existing OmniORB and Mico code bases to look
at, and I think they would be useful, especially when implementing IIOP
and other language-independant routines.

I have some ideas on making this thing really fast for shared library
activations, meaning we don't have to worry about bloat ;-) A start on all
this stuff is in CVS as the 'ORBit' module. I don't plan to be doing much
work on it right now, but at least a few Gimp hackers are willing to help
with it once Gimp 1.0.1 comes out.

However, if anyone else has time now, *please* feel free to have a go at
it ;_)

-- Elliot					http://www.redhat.com/
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way
to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates from "The Road Ahead," p. 265.