Paul Rosen wrote: > This certainly seems like a universal problem, not just ours. I'm only > familiar with the Windows environment, and it is simple to make a DLL with a > straight C or COM or .NET interface that any other windows program can use. > Is there no mechanism like that on MAC and LINUX?
.NET may eventually be portable to many systems through some open source projects out there. Personally I find .NET to be a poor design and too closely tied to C#. I won't use it and don't recommend it. If you want a good framework tied to a specific language, use Java or GNUStep/Cocoa instead. COM is MS only. CORBA might work, but I don't know much about it. Straight ANSI C in source form is probably the most portable thing out there, and in a statically linked library (for each platform) is a close followup, requiring only a recompile for each platform. Putting it into a DLLs or the like are also possible, but will require some platform specific code. > I'm thinking that there will probably have to be a portion of this that is > not portable. There will be the core parser that is portable and has all the > work in it, then there will be the interface, which may be different for > different languages and different OSes. If the parser is in ANSI C, and simply returns a pointer to a C data structure (which probably points to arrays and other structures...) containing the parsed data, then the interface is pretty simple and totally portable. You'll need to add some glue routines for various languages to convert that data into something the language can access, but that's not actually part of the parser itself. A while back, I suggested the returned data structures should be serialized into a buffer with all internal pointers converted to offsets, to make it easier for some languages. After some thought, I think the parser itself should just return the top level C structure pointer. Any other data format conversions - to a serialized buffer with offsets; to an intermediate text format; to another language specific format, etc... - can be separate glue routines. -->Steve Bennett To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
