Re: C++ Binding Project?

[Bert Peers <rat@larian.com>]

alan@pcmagic.net wrote:

> I've been lurking on this list for a while, but I have a question
> triggered by the recent discussion/flame war about C++ as a language.

Flame war ?  I think the past days had about the most civilised treatment
of the topic I've ever seen :^)

> In particular, there was an objection raised to using C++ in code
> libraries because of difficulty in creating language bindings to code
> outside C++.  IMO its a valid point.  Does anyone know of a open source
> project that aids C++ binding to other languages.

Netscape have defined a platform independent COM/CORBAish
object layout in open source.  With a binary standard defined for the
vtable layout, the objects can be called from within C etc (see other post)
so their approach is sortof half the answer..

> It seems to me that work to automatically generate procedural bindings
> to C++ would remove a valid objection to using C++ as a library
> language.  One of the simpler ideas I'm kicking around is a C++ header
> parsing engine the might convert something like:

This is what the IDL for OLE does; IDL stands for Interface Definition
Language and is very similar to the public part of a C++ class
specification.
An IDL to whatever language then generates header files for calling those
objects (I hope I have this right it's been a while)..  So probably what you

want should already be partially provided by open source CORBA
implementations (check the Gnome site) which uses a similar technique.

Maybe Jorrit can elaborate on this ?..

Bert
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