[Openmcl-devel] CLOS/C++ interface?

[Gary Byers]

On Wed, 24 May 2006, Kaveh Kardan wrote:

> Is there an FFI for using C++ classes in OpenMCL?  Ideally mapped onto CLOS?

No, though it's something that we'd like to have and someone at Clozure
is scheduled to work on it (if they ever get untangled from the final
stages of another long project.)

A couple of years ago, someone on this list (or possible bug-openmcl)
was running into a bug that may or may not have been fixed.  (I don't
remember the details, but there was some confusion about that.)  I
asked to see their code and they sent it to me; it was an interface
to the qt GUI library (used in KDE and written in C++.)

I just glanced at most of the code (I was mostly interested in
determining whether or not the bug had been fixed), but I remember
thinking that the C++ interface was a lot simpler than I'd expected
it to be.

I didn't keep a copy, the person who wrote it is no longer on the
list, and mail to the email address they had at the time bounced
(as of earlier this year.)

>
> I see the Objective-C bridge, but can't find any mention of a C++ bridge.

Many people (myself included) suffer from an (as far as I know)
unnamed condition which causes violent headaches and other unpleasant
symptoms whenever C++ is mentioned.  This is unfortunate, since it
tends to discourage development of something (a C++ bridge) that
many people might find useful.

The ObjC ABI has a lot of facilities that allow introspection and
runtime modification.  I don't think that this is as true of 
C++ ABIs. It's hard to predict just how ambitious a C++ bridge
could be as far as things like CLOS integration go.  It might
be easier to predict that if we were at the point where some
basic stuff (method calls/callbacks) worked, and we aren't
at that point yet.

>
> Kaveh
>
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