Re: [guppi-list] New Guppi Snapshot

[linas linas org]

It's been rumoured that Jon Trowbridge said:
> 
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 11:11:44AM -0500, linas@linas.org wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> > Out of idle curiosity: why doesn't anybody ever mention using corba
> > IDL's to define the programming interfaces? 
> 
> A few guesses:
> 
> * Corba adds overhead.
> * Corba adds complexity.
> * Corba would restrict what args types you can use, and how you use them.
> * In many cases, it probably doesn't make sense to export your whole API via
>   Corba --- just some subset of it.  
> 
> Assuming these four things are true, it seems best to build your API
> "natively" w/ C and then wrap the relevant parts with Corba bindings,
> as necessary.

Well, I suspected as much, but it interesting how different your answer
is from Havoc's.  Which is why I brought it up.

On each of your points, Havoc implies the following:

> * Corba adds overhead.

No, its about the same as it would be for e.g. g-wrap (the automatic
C-to-scheme binding thingy rob browning & rob merkel have built)
But this is academic argument, as there is no corba-idl-to-scheme 
defined or available.  (Note g-wrap came to be because SWIG was
wrong/inappropriate/unfixable)

> * Corba adds complexity.
which of the three types of complexity: 
-- the average programmer needs to know yet another thing? 
-- the build environment gets to complex (we had this problem with 
   swig in gnucash: although its used automatically by the makefiles,
   you had to find & install swig first.  Since swig  isn't in redhat
   or whatever by default, it caused a lot of upset).
-- the install/runtime env is too complex? (a leading cause of gnucash
   install failures were unmet dependencies on other nonstandard
   packages).


> * Corba would restrict what args types you can use, and how you use them.
??? Do you mean 'memory mangement problems', like what happens when I
pass an array from here to there?

> * In many cases, it probably doesn't make sense to export your whole API via
>   Corba --- just some subset of it.  

Do you want your whole scheme API available to C++ programmers, or just a
subset of it?  Is it right to treat C++ coders as second-class-citizens?

> (Disclaimer: I'm not a Corba expert, although I play one on TV...)

Me too.

--linas