[Setup-tool-hackers] RE: Shipping Vera with 2.4

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

Sander Vesik wrote:
> Onthe other hand, language binding to a large variety of 
> languages for CORBA exist now

Well, specifications for language mappings exists, but each ORB needs its
own implementation. Because GNOME chose to write its own ORB (ORBit) there
are still very few language bindings for it. In fact I don't think there are
any that are complete or stable, and the complication of CORBA means that
it's unlikely that they will be finished any time soon.

Personally I do wish we could use CORBA for all IPC but I recognise these
practical problems:
- CORBA in C is ridiculously difficult. GNOME uses C.
- ORBit2, being a new ORB, has no other usable language bindings,
particularly no complete C++ bindings for use by KDE.
- Very few GNOME people understand CORBA because the Bonobo C API does not
make a clear distinction between the CORBA interfaces, the C sugar for those
interfaces, and other random C stuff. I suspect that this is part of the
reason that we could never use a different CORBA ORB (maybe one with C++
mappings) to do Bonobo programming. Also, Bonobo has a terrible lack of
documentation even now.

If we really wanted to use CORBA for simple system-wide IPC then I think we
would have to reconsider our choices or ORBit and Bonobo. I don't think we
want to do that.

Murray Cumming
murrayc@usa.net
www.murrayc.com 
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