Re: [Vala] C Integration, it's cool

[Giulio Paci <giuliopaci interfree it>]

Il 17/12/2011 22:01, Evan Nemerson ha scritto:
> On Sat, 2011-12-17 at 14:46 +0100, Giulio Paci wrote:
> > Il 16/12/2011 19:55, Rodrigo Herefeld ha scritto:
> > > I've found a goodie, i needed to use libcurl in a vala program, just to
> > > fetch a file regulary from the internet,
> > > after some searching i end up doing that:
> > >
> > > i write all the curl thing in a c program , then i wrote a function that
> > > makes the connection and return
> > > the content of the file.
> > > in vala i wrote
> > >
> > > exter  char[] my-curl-fun-in-c();
> > > and called that from vala where i needed
> > >
> > > compile like that:
> > > valac valasource.vala csource.c -X -l curl
> >
> > Hi, thank you for the tip.
> >
> > Maybe this is a bit off-topic for this thread, but I am writing a
> > libcurl.vapi file here:
> > https://github.com/giuliopaci/ValaBindingsDevelopment
>
> Why not use libsoup?
>
> I'm not saying you should use libsoup... I'm guessing you have your
> reasons for not doing so and I'm genuinely curious about what they are.

Well, actually I am not sure about this: when I started writing the vapi
my goal was learning to write a vapi file, while trying to learn
something else (i.e., how to use libcurl).

One of the thing that I like in libcurl is that you can easily test
things using the curl program, which I know quite well.
Before writing the libcurl vapi file I just compared the features
reported on the libsoup and libcurl homepage: libcurl seems to be more
complete and supports much more than HTTP, so for me it was worth to
invest time on it.
What libcurl is missing is a server API, but there are a lot of other
libraries for that.
In my opinion if you just need an HTTP client both libsoup and libcurl
can be used. If you need an HTTP client and a simple server, probably
libsoup is a better alternative. If you need anything more, probably
libcurl + some other library is the best option, but my opinion is based
only on the homepages of those two libraries.

Bests,
        Giulio.