Re: [guppi-list] New Guppi Snapshot

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

linas@linas.org writes:
> It's been rumoured that Neil J Pilgrim said:
> > 
> > I suppose the absence of an up-to-date and working GTK-- version didn't
> > help with developing guppi in C++ too.
> > 
> > One thing I was wondering was whether it is possible to use some too
> > like doc++ to generate documentation from the code; the use of OO in C
> > doesn't strike me as easy to parse in this way however.
>

gtk-doc works quite nicely for C API docs and understands the GTK
object system.
 
> Out of idle curiosity: why doesn't anybody ever mention using corba
> IDL's to define the programming interfaces?  Is it because CORBA is 
> too messy?  To hard to set up?  auto-generates ugly C++ bindings?
> To hard to understand? too hard to use?  Lacks IDL-to-scheme stub
> generator?  'stubs are evil'? 
> 
> I'm wondering because corba was envisioned to be this nice
> cross-language thingy, and it never really filled that promise, 
> and I'm trying to figure out if it should be fixed, or abandoned, or if
> its best left onn the sidelines, as it is today.
> 

As much as it may pain us to say it, COM and Microsoft's new Visual
Studio (with C# etc.) do this very well. All their APIs are just COM
objects, so you get the same API in C++, C#, Visual Basic. This shows
that it's possible in principle, and that a major vendor sees the
value in it.

I don't think CORBA per se is the issue; our CORBA is small and fast,
and the complexity of CORBA is mostly in the services (transaction
service, security service, yada yada) that we don't implement. We are
using CORBA in an extremely straightforward way; the only remotely
complicated thing is the POA, and we could easily provide convenience
wrappers that made that simple.

Some possible problems:

 - lack of documentation
 - API instability (Bonobo, OAF etc. not settled down yet)
 - Bonobo and ORBit do not really support non-C languages
   as well as they should, need people to work on this
 - the standard C bindings for CORBA are too annoying, we need
   to implement nonstandard bindings based on GLib and GObject, 
   with GError instead of CORBA_Environment, etc.

Havoc