Re: glib / CORBA integration examples ...

[Dan Kegel <dank kegel com>]

Michael Meeks wrote:
> 
> Hi Alex,
> 
> On Mon, 2002-09-16 at 20:49, Alex Graveley wrote:
> > This thinking is folly in my opinion.  Everyone *hates* the CORBA C
> > bindings.
> 
>         So - tell me precisely - why !? beyond stating people's vague feeling
> of hatred ;-) can you give a bulleted list of reasons ?

I can tell you my reason: conversion.  To use Corba properly, one
must convert between one's own data structures and Corba's on every
call to a corba function.  This is a pain the the rear as well as
a performance problem.  I'm not saying Corba is bad; I'm a Corba fan.
I'm just saying it's hard to integrate.

> ...
> > Drop the C bindings, and C binding compatibility.  Make the IDL compiler
> > generate code which accept GLists for CORBA sequences, and GArrays for
> > CORBA arrays.
> 
>         It would make more sense to use DCE, and just marshal the GList nodes.
> Ultimately - you're going to have memory management complexity when you
> can have local/remote objects. I'm not convinced that glib's type system
> is going to make that at all easy.
> 
>         Things like using GLists sound fine - until you realise that we'd have
> to have a global lock to allocate each list element - or de-marshal
> anything; in the (potential) threaded world that's quite unfriendly for
> performance [ plus GLists are intrinsically far less efficient - using
> GArray for everything would make much more sense ].

I'm no fan of glib -- from my point of view, it's an annoying library
that
just makes my life as an embedded systems programmer harder -- but
people using it for all their containers would probably appreciate
it if orbit's corba binding could accept those containers natively.
Sure, it's not portable at the api level, but it would be at the
protocol level.

- Dan