Re: This Week

[Roger Gregory <roger>]

To what extent was markms design an xpp based version of your interface?

I think not.  As far as I can tell the user needn't know xpp was used in the
implementation.

We should implement the c++ version on top of xpp, that's the whole point.
It allows it to build it quickly and stay up to date painlessly.
I expect that ceran will not be needed for the C interfaces, it is almost
painless to make extern "C" functions by hand for such a small set of things.
Remember that the external interface will not change much, but the internals
will.  Keeping all the code in smalltalk including the external "C" definitions
will make development a lot cleaner, and I volunteer to generate the
extern "C" definitions by hand.  It will be simpler than generating the table
of correspondences between the mangled names and the real ones, or very close.

On rereading your message I was shocked to see that you might not be doing this 
in smalltalk, that is a big mistake, you will be buying a lot of incompatibility
during development.  Not using xpp is a lot worse, the communications code
will be evolving in a way that will be very cheap to -track- using xpp and 
VERY hard to do by hand.  That was the whole point of all our discussion about
initialized static globals and garbage collection, which will not be needed
if you don't use xpp, but which will not be a problem if you do.