[Xotcl] XOTcl future

[Kristoffer Lawson]

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, Uwe Zdun wrote:

> - list of all procs defined for an object (procs + all instprocs up the  
>   heritage order)
> - list of all mixins (mixins+instmixins) for an obj
> - list of all filters (filters+instfilters) for an obj
> 
> Perhaps return certain infos conditionally as ligthweight objects ...
> 
> Were/are there any other suggestions?

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.

So what I would need is a semi-standard documented mechanism for
adding procs and instprocs to objects from C (and, possibly later, C++)
so that the C implementations can rely on the same information about
object context and next-chaining as the XOTcl code itself. To take this
even further, I may want to implement complete objects in C.

I've given this some amount of thought, but I don't have any really
worthwhile suggestions to give as to how best to do this. I just think
that now, with 1.0 coming out, is a good time to really put some thought
into this. Another reason is that while the language develops I'm sure it
will be more and more difficult to specify a complete library for
this. With a simple core a library can be built and the extended as new
aspects arise that use the same core.

Does this make sense at all?

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