On 06 Oct 2009, at 10:25, Juha Manninen wrote:
A common library format for compiled OO languages would be a real
improvement,
competing directly with the development happening in dynamic /
interpreted
languages.
I guess I am not the first person to have this idea, but... wrote it
anyway.
This is the goal of the Microsoft CLI (Common Language
Infrastructure). The library format in this case is an intermediate
one rather than a native one (CIL, Common Intermediate Language), but
it can be statically compiled into machine code afterwards. It also
supports both dynamic languages (there are e.g. IronPython and
IronRuby) and non-dynamic languages (C#, F#, C++, C, ...). It's also
supposed to have explicit support for mixing different object models
in a single program.
Borland/CodeGear tried to take advantage of this with Delphi .NET, but
apparently weren't very successful with it (although that's probably
in the eye of the beholder). I never looked into the details, so I
don't know why.
Having a common API without an intermediate format would however be
virtually impossible to design, especially if you want to guarantee
backwards binary compatibility for all of the languages that you want
to interoperate. You really need some kind of intermediate level with
meta-information (higher level than the pure machine code) which
describes what is a class, a method, inheritance trees, etc if you
want to enable transparently mixing code coming from different
languages/compilers.
Well, you could try to write something like http://sourceware.org/libffi/
geared at different object models rather than at simply different
ABIs, but I think it would be more fragile and it would offer less
integration possibilities.
Jonas
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