[Xotcl] Re: XOTcl future

Gustaf Neumann neumann@wu-wien.ac.at
Thu, 27 Sep 2001 22:20:22 +0200


On Thursday 27 September 2001 17:06, you wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 September 2001 05:19 pm, you wrote:
> > A hugely important feature I would like to see in the near future,
> > and one I've asked about before, is for a good C&C++ interface. I know
> > this is not an easy issue to deal with, but for some things it would
> > actually be quite vital. For me, the normal application development model
> > would be to built everything in Tcl/XOTcl first, and then to begin
> > converting critical parts to C if better performance is required.

 This is certainly the way to go for many realword applications.
 we need two things 
  (a) as everybody empahsized a good C-API
  (b) a conveniant way to integrate c and c++ code.

 SWIG is doing quite well on the C side. We have as well started to
 make a powerful C++ interface, that maps C++ classes into XOTcl classes.
 This way, it is possible to use C++ classes and objects together 
 with mixins, filters etc., without even knowing the XOTcl C-API.
 what we have now is that C++ classes can be plugged into the 
 XOTcl class hierarchy (sub- and superclassed, but e.g. no next 
 from c++)

 What we did was for SWIG 1.3.6; what we did was mostly the C++ side.
 we won't have it ready for 0.9. Our code is still full of debug info,
 some of the code for interfacing c has do be done, some code of the
 c++ interface relies on the naming conventions of swig, so there is
 still some work to do. The newest release of SWIG is 1.3.9. if there
 are volunteers, to help out, these are very welcome.

 best regards
-gustaf