Re: What can I do to help? (conclusions)

[rm@fabula.de]

On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 06:14:29PM +0200, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
> rm@fabula.de writes:
>  [...]
> > Yes, a GOOPS-ish guile-libxml would be great, but there _is_ currently
> > no C goops interface. 
> >
> I always wonder why people say that... There is a goops.h, which
> declares basically all the functions you need. i

I never said it wouldn'T be possible to write bindings that use goops --
as far as i understand there are no official (read: stable ) APIs, and
the last thing i want to do is to manually craft bindings that stop working
after the next major (minor?) version change. A while ago i really wanted
to use SCWM, but unfortunately the program used some carefully handcrafted
code to catch exceptions (see some of the recent posts in this mailing list)
that worked fine in the version of Guile it was designed for but broke 
misserably on my newer version. I'd be willing to do such work if unavoidable
but i would not want to write bindings for a monster like libxml2 unless
i know it's going to be there for a while ;-)

> Well, you could build
> some higher-level/easier-to-use functions on top of them, and in some
> areas there are no 'clean' bindings so you have to do a bit of
> hackery, but I managed to implement a C++ interface to GOOPS - so it
> *is* possible. It took me some hours of poking around in goops.c,
> since the stuff is not really documented.
> 
>> [...]
> Hmm, you begin to provoke my interest. Maybe after my C++ interface is
> mature enough (should be in a few weeks), I might give it a shot,
> however, it would help me a lot to get going how you imagine the
> interface to look like.

Well, i have one sitting on my box, but am reluctant to publish it 
because a) it's handcrafted (-> lot's of duplicated code and still  a
lot is missing) b) i don't like the API ... i find with such an important
lib it's of utter importance to find a 'natural' way of integrating 
XML into Scheme/Guile (i'm pretty impressed by Oleg's work) -- also,
i'm using Daniel Veillard's Python bindings daily (i have to, i'm affraid)
and i'm very unhappy with the way they feel (too C-ish). 
I envision to follow Daniel's path in auto-creating the bindings from the
exisiting API description in XML format.

> Talking about C++, I suggest adding configure flag that causes the
> Guile interpreter to be linked by g++, so modules can be implemented
> in C++. (Python, on Debian, for example is linked this way).

Hmmm, what are the consequences in terms of code emitted -- doesn't that
result in (horrible) stuff like symbol name mangling ?

 Ralf Mattes


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