On 5/17/2010 7:43 PM, Trevor Dennis wrote:
On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Elizabeth M Smith
<emsm...@elizabethmariesmith.com
<mailto:emsm...@elizabethmariesmith.com>> wrote:
On 5/17/2010 7:36 PM, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:23 AM, Elizabeth M Smith
<emsm...@elizabethmariesmith.com
<mailto:emsm...@elizabethmariesmith.com>> wrote:
As we discussed during the summit and is mentioned on the wiki:
Ah, found it.
Few dependencies
Fast
Small
Binding facilities for most high level languages are common
The ability to tie a C library into anything and everything
is the biggest
reason to use C over C++, using and binding to C++ libraries
(especially in
most languages - they tend to be written in C) is a real
headache - actually
beyond a headache, most times it's just a recipe for failure.
C++ can do C bindings as well, can't it? Our bindings should
certainly be C.
Doesn't C++ share the other advantages?
Olaf
What? I mean binding coapp to other higher level languages
primarily written in C. Perl, Python, PHP, Lua, D etc.
and if we write it in C - yes a C++ binding would be easy as well.
Thanks,
Elizabeth Smith
In case Olaf means writing the library in C++ itself instead of C, only
functions defined outside of a class can
be defined with a C binding. As soon as it's in a class it must use C++
bindings and all the name
mangling takes effect. Once that happens, connecting to the classes
from the other languages is
almost impossible.
I've seen people try to to create bindings to a C++ library and it
usually involves writing a middle C layer between the
other apps and the C++ library. No point in doing that if we can just
write it in C in the first place.
Hrm. I'm with Olaf on this one. I've had fantastic success with
minimalistic C++ APIs, very clean C exports, and then using FFI (i.e.
ctypes in Python, Inline:: in Perl) in dynamic languages for binding.
And I've even got an example online:
http://blogs.onresolve.com/?p=48
Scroll down a bit and you'll hit a section called 'Interfacing to C
libraries (.dll/.so) using ctypes and decorators'. Using that approach,
I had a product.dll of <25k (forgot the exact size), and I could call
into it from Python, Perl and NSIS, without any reliance on SWIG or
having to write CPython/Perl bridge code in C.
I'm perplexed why anyone would want to forgo the advantages of C++ for
C; I can make my C++ DLLs just as small as C ones. And, like, what if I
want a linked list, or a hash, or a set, are we planning on writing all
of those from scratch? Even string handling alone seems like a huge win.
...
Tried to resist getting involved in this one for as long as I could ;-)
Trent.
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