[Openmcl-devel] FFI stuff, C++, wxWidgets

[Gary Byers]

Part of Hamilton's message (of several weeks ago) had to do with the
desirability/practicality of a wxWidgets interface.

If anyone's interested in this, they might find the wxCL project

<http://www.wxcl-project.org>

of interest.

I just stumbled on this a few minutes ago; at first glance, it -looks-
like they solve the C++-interface issues by avoiding them (by using
a C wrapper library.)  If that guess is correct, it'd offer a way
of using at least some large subset of wxWidgets from OpenMCL.  (I
have no idea what the thread/event issues might be, and have no
idea about many of the other things that one would want/need to know
about.)




On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Hamilton Link wrote:

> I'm sending a shout out to Larry Pells, but if anyone else has a dime's
> worth of opinion on this feel free to chime in.
>
> A while back Larry was having some UFFI stuff lock up when he was
> interfacing with C++.  In the last few years, several things have
> changed to make me think about an openmcl/C++ interface: (a) the
> lintel/macintel port of openmcl looming on the horizon, (b) my
> discovering that wxWidgets is bundled with Tiger and is nicely
> cross-platform on linux, (c) me having to learn MFC doc/view stuff and
> use VC++ to do stuff professionally (harsh, I know), and (d) Gary
> saying there's a standard C++ ABI now.
>
> Gary mentioned that someone might already have figured out how to get
> C++ and openmcl talking, and reviewing past email Larry seems to have
> been doing callbacks as well as presumably calling into C++, all using
> UFFI.
>
> For Larry... How much of a pain was all that, and what were the issues
> you had to deal with to make it work (if you can share)?  Is your
> solution available to other openmcl users that might want to do C++
> interfacing, and how much would have to be done to wrap something other
> than the libraries you were calling?  Also you were doing this for,
> what, Qt?  Do you think there would be more issues talking to wxWidgets
> or do you think it's a mostly-solved problem?
>
> Also, for discussion by the people on the list... while I like the ObjC
> bridge and the IDE isn't all that bad, the IDE might be better done
> with wxWidgets, because it would port to openmcl/linux---also, I have a
> nagging suspicion that if someone were to throw money at the problem it
> would be sensible for a professional GUI developer to start with a
> blank slate than revise the existing IDE.  Anyone who has actual
> experience with wxWidgets feel free to chime in on their experiences.
> Are any customers of MCL out there that would consider moving to
> openmcl if it had an IDE, willing to fund or collaboratively fund the
> development of one?
>
> Happy Holidays,
> hamilton
>
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