Re: ORBit (was Re: * mico)

[Phillip Dawes <philipd parallax co uk>]

J. Patrick Narkinsky wrote:
> 
> On 19 Feb 1998, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> <Much snipping>
> 
> > I think lean mean core + add-ons is very much the way to go. But
> > I also tend to think that we should struggle on with MICO + hacks
> > for a while. There is plenty of other work to do right now, and
> > I don't think any of us has the experience to predict where the
> > bottlenecks in the design are.
> >
> 
> Well, I think the core questions is how much recoding effort would be
> required to port an application from say Mico to OmniORB?  How similar are
> these beasts?  If all that's necessary is to recompile some IDL, then I
> say let's try to get cracking with Mico and when efforts to develop a
> faster ORB succeed, we'll use that instead; if we're not stuck with it,
> who cares?
> 
> Of course, if we ARE stuck with the ORB chosen...  ACK!  How messy.
> 
> Patrick
> 

It should be just a case of re-compiling the idl providing that both
orbs support the same standard features, and we don't deviate from those
standards. The problem is that mico doesn't support other language
bindings than C++ and Java, and I think Elliot is musing over whether
it's worth his time to develop C bindings for mico when we may end up
coding our own 'C' orb with the gimp lot anyway.

I still think it'd be better as a short term solution to use omniorb for
C and C++ bindings. Mico uses dii/dsi for its C++ bindings, and this is
a real performance hit compared to omniorb. Just take a look at the
stubs that the idl compiler knocks out to see what I mean.

The other issue is objective C. This is Elliot's favourate
'close-to-the-metal' oo language, and AFAIK we're a bit dubious about
getting that to link with a C++ orb.

Cheers,

Phil.

P.S. I meant to have mico-python bindings out yestaurday, but I was
called away to London over the weekend so I didn't have any time. If
anybody else was thinking of doing them, don't let me put you off -
anything I do is likely to take a lot of time due to my time
constraints. Alternatively, if you fancy sharing the task, drop me a
mail..

-- 
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 Phil Dawes                               |   My opinions are my own
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