Re: [GD-General] scripting via COM?

[Chad A. <ae...@ae...>]

Hi Andras,

I've gone down that road before, and it wasn't very pretty.  That said, XPCOM 
isn't a bad solution.  Integrates with JavaScript and Python and perhaps others. 
  You compile your IDL files into type libraries and C++ headers which the 
scripting language can use to understand how to talk to various interfaces (via 
some platform-dependent assembly).  The main reason I never followed through was 
that it's kind of annoying to use language-independent interfaces that can't 
take advantage of X or Y features of the language people end up using.  (Take 
the DOM as an example.)

Good luck,
Chad

Andras Balogh wrote:
> Well, yeah, this is not really a game engine, although it's similar. The 
> big difference is that with a game engine, one could make a decision 
> that it will be scripted with Lua, and be done with it. In this case 
> however, customers will probably want to use our rendering services from 
> all kinds of different languages, so it would be preferable not to have 
> such binding limitations.
> 
> Do you have any other ideas, how I could make my objects available in a 
> way so it's usable by many languages, yet is simple to implement?
> 
> 
> Andras
> 
> brian sharon wrote:
> 
>> I don't think anyone has pointed this out yet, but COM objects are  
>> not inherently scriptable in and of themselves.  Anything scriptable  
>> by .NET, VB and other such languages has to implement IDispatch.  So  
>> adding scriptability to your engine won't be as simple as just  
>> deriving everything from IUnknown.  For starters, I'm guessing that  
>> all your methods that you wish to expose aren't already returning  
>> HRESULTs.
>>
>> Trying to implement game engine scriptability through COM Automation  
>> has to be just about the most painful way you could go.
>>
>> --brian
>>
>> On 26 Jan 2006, at 18:07, Andras Balogh wrote:
>>
>>> I've heard that you can use COM objects from .NET using some wrapper.
>>> My only problem with pure .NET is that not all customers are ready  
>>> to use it. I would like to have a package that you can use from  
>>> unmanaged C/C++ as well as from VB, Python, Lua, C#...
>>> Also, I definitely want to keep my engine in the unmanaged world.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Andras
>>>
>>> Jon Watte wrote:
>>>
>>>> If you want to be Microsoft specific (which COM is), then you  
>>>> probably would do better supporting the CLR (.NET). It is much  
>>>> richer, and there's a wide variety of languages that run within  the 
>>>> CLR. The development and debugging tools are also top-notch.
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>             / h+
>>>> Andras Balogh wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Now, I believe that most decent scripting languages have some  kind of
>>>>> support to easily call into COM objects. So I was thinking: Wouldn't
>>>>> it be the best to just wrap my engine into a COM object, and then  the
> 
> 
> 
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