Re: ORB?

[Philip Dawes <philipd parallax co uk>]

Benedikt Heinen wrote:
> > MICO looks pretty simple and easy to understand.  Probably doing this
> > hack for MICO is also worth doing.
> 
> Hmm, but if I understand correctly, those wrappers won't free you from having
> to have a c++ library and headers around, since those wrappers will use
> libmico, right?
>
>   If that is the case, why even bother to do those wrappers? Since you're
> required to have a c++ library/includes around, you'll most likely also have
> a c++ compiler around, why not use that directly? Or am I wrong here?
> 
>   Benedikt


Those were my initial thoughts as well, however my past experience has
been that there are a *lot* of people who hate c++ and resent even the
thought of being forced to use it in place of C. If Gnome is to be a
true language-independent platform we can't ignore these people.

I'd imagine that people who will want to compile gnome in the future
will need a c++ compiler eventually anyway, just because there are a lot
of c++ programmers out there.

The other thing is that some people prefer objective C over C++ for
doing low level OO stuff. How difficult will it be to link ObjC wrappers
to c++ libraries? Can this be done? (Elliot?)

I've just had a quick thumb through the standard corba C lanugage
mappings. As far as I can tell, the mapping is similar to what we do
with gtk at the moment - pass a pointer to the 'object' structure as the
first argument to a method for that object. In corba you also have to
pass a pointer to an 'environment' structure as well, which gets filled
up with error information to cope with the absence of exception support
in the C language. 


Cheers,

Phil.

-- 
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 Phil Dawes                               |   My opinions are my own
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