Christian wrote:
> >The core of our "abc subsystem" (please, someone suggest a name for this
> >"thing") could be released as a library (a dll under Win32) that can be
> I question the idea of it being a .dll... the purpose of this is to be a
> universal parser for software written in any language, and on any
platform.
That's why I promote the use of a scripting language. Let me push Lua for a
while.
Lua is multiplatform. It has been compiled on any Unix flavour I've never
heard of, on Palm, Windows, WinCE, Mac, PS2, XBOX, (don't know about Game
Cube), this gives a boost about platform independence (both HW and SO).
Lua has its native interface with C/C++ but other mechanisms are available:
LuaJava, LuaAda, LuaCOM (for MS COM objects) and if someone needs a new
interface it can count on the very active Lua community.
Lua is widespread in the gaming industry (Grim Fandango, Impossible
Creatures, MDK2, Homeworld 2, Escape from Monkey Island, ...) where speed,
robustness and ease of use are a must. That's a guarantee for me!
Anyway, I said that on Windows it COULD be distributed as a DLL but you are
not forced to do so.
Since we want to be able to embed ABCp (let's stick with this name for now)
in other applications, we have no choice but structuring it as a library
that could be linked statically or dinamically to the host application.
If the linkage is dinamic, it means a .dll on Windows, a .so on Linux and
whatever other mechanism is in place on the targeted platform.
The command line tools will access the same libraries, again either
statically or dinamically linked.
The hard part, IMHO, is that of creating a language-independent interface
(or worst, maintain a different interfacing mechanism for each language).
Scripting languages as Lua (but also Python and Ruby, to be fair) already
solved it .
I think we are a bit off topic here with this technical issues, we risk to
annoy someone!
May I propose to move the technical discussion to the list on sourceforge
(I'm going to subscribe right now) and coming back to this list for advice
on how internally represent an ABC file, criticisms and other things more
"abc-ish"?
Bye,
Remo
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