I'll post, if only to prove there are more than three subscribers to the list. :)
Hello.
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 04:18:54AM -0800, Darren Duncan wrote:
The NCI should allow most libraries to be loaded and called into without wrapping with C glue; but some, depending on their quirkiness, may require a wrapper in C.
I am hoping that we can avoid going out to using C if possible. The NCI is very good and there is still a lot of work to be done on it.
But if they are entirely PASM or IMCC, then what features does Parrot provide that would magically talk to the native C libraries for each database product?
The underlying platform's dynamic loading mechanism. Check out docs/pdds/pdd16_native_call.pod.
This is one area the Parrot guys are looking at. We should eventually have "runtime loading".
I'll comment that for my money merely having DBI-style functionality available for other languages is enormously worth it, I'd argue the successful design of the DBI argues against changing its core features. OTOH extensibility is a good thing, so perhaps providing easy ways to extend the DBI is the way to go.
I would be pleasantly suprised to see a better design. It is a very mature product and as you say its success is a good indication that it must be doing something right ;-)
I would very much doubt that users will see a radical new DBI, besides, we are meant to be discussing the Parrot Database Interface PDBI layer which I doubt users are going to see at all. The DBI layer that will be written for each language is a long way off.
What we might see if we get the PDBI layer working well is languages having more frontend modules or libs that use the PDBI
Chair of Quantum Non-binary Accumulators Louden Nelson Memorial Tea Club of Santa Cruz
???? ;-)
Harry
