Hi Terry,
> Part of the Standard includes a requirement for support for Interface
> Description Language
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_description_language) from the
> Distributed Computing Environment Specification which is maintained by
> The Open Group.
(That link's about IDLs in general, not DCE's.)
> We have always used MS Visual Studio to utilise IDL in our tools, but
> now I need to identify alternative and cross-platform tools to compile
> an IDL file and also to compile a program that uses an IDL file to
> define its API with system drivers.
>
> Can anyone tell me:
> 1. Is IDL generally used outside of MS and / or Windows?
I rarely hear of it anymore. DCE originated outside of MS and they used
bits of it. There's bound to be legacy Unix stuff still based on it and
some new in-house code by existing users may continue using it.
> 2. If so, are there alternative tools to manipulate it?
The Open Group made the source available for their programs I think, and
it was forked at one point because there was going to be a licence
change.
> 3. Are any of those tools available on Unix/Linux platforms?
http://www.opengroup.org/dce/mall/
http://freedce.sf.net/
The latter includes a yacc(1) grammar for an IDL compiler.
http://freedce.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=freedce/freedce;a=blob;f=freedce/idl/acf_y.y;h=7fc2bb4b86e8fcc8ff8b85d85b876c233e1aec37;hb=HEAD
The grammar proper starts at line 265.
Cheers, Ralph.
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