Re: [Introspector-developers] current status

[<cr...@is...>]

On Sat, 21 Dec 2002, James Michael DuPont wrote:

> hey craig,
> thanks for writing. Come and visit us on the #introspector
> irc.openprojects.net for a chat.

Email is my preferred communication medium, but I'll consider getting an
IRC client (folks on the schmoo and a couple other lists wanted to chat
via IRC as well; I guess I'm just not the chatty type :-/).

Note that I'm going to be celebrating Yule/Winter Solstice for most of
this weekend.  After that I should have some time over the holidays.

> > Hey -
> >
> > I've been looking at this and gccxml. It's a little hard for me to
> > figure out what the current status of this project is. Will this work
> > on win32?

> yes it will, with cygwin, i have been testing with the 3.2, but the
> berkley db support of redland is not dont on win32.

I don't know much about redland or RDF (tho I know a bit about XML
Schema). Can we use mysql rather than berkely db, or is redland itself not
ported to win32? I did not see cygwin listed on redland's site.

Do you currently serialize the parse tree in binary format, or do you only
write it out to xml/rdf? Does it make sense to use binary format? Was part
of the vision to allow arbitrary modification of the parse tree during
compilation, and if so, would that require converting the xml/rdf back to
binary format for gcc to process? Sorry if these are naive/obvious
questions...

> > I started to look into this option (a couple years ago now), RMS sent
> > me a
> > 'cease and desist letter', which kinda took the wind out of my sails.
> well i have had lots of interactions with RMS, he is just trying to
> play politics. Most of the gcc guys dont like the idea of making
> interfaces, but they will like it when we are done.
>
> > I know this has been a long-standing debate, but I never got any clear
> > answers except for 'RMS don't like it, and I'm tired of arguing with
> > him about it', and RMS replying 'I don't have time to go into details,
> > I just don't like it'. Oh well. It finally appears that there's enough
> > momentum for this to finally get somewhere. :-)

> yes, please do help. get yourself a Sourceforge account and mail it to
> me.

cperras is my sourceforge account. I just read from Redland's site that
sourceforge has a compiler farm. That's really cool. I'll have to check
that out.

> > I've looked into several related projects, including OpenC++, gccxml,
> > and
>
> > PDT (http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/paracomp/pdtoolkit/), and
> I might have seen this, but it is not free.

Yes, the license seemed to indicate it was, but the EDG front-end is not
freely redistributable.

> > Root
> > (http://root.cern.ch/).
> that is new

It's pretty interesting. Like most of these projects, however, there's a
number of restrictions placed on the C++ code.

> >  I'd be happy to try to help out on this project. Some things I have
> > potentially relevant knowledge of include:
> >
> > c, c++, gccxml, openc++ (tho it's been a little while), pdt, xml,
> > mysql/odbc, boost. I'm not very skilled with Perl or Bison/Yacc. My
> > main linux dev box has been having hardware problems, and also for a
> > few other reasons, win32 is my main dev platform right now.
>
> ok, then you might want to help with the testing of the debian packaging
> of the gui elements for mingw32/cygwin. Mike Garnsey and I have been
> working on porting gtk to windows via the deb packaging system for the
> gui.

I really want to focus on C++ reflection right now, and get that working
on win32 if it's not already. I'm not sure how the gui will help with
that. OTOH, I've been looking into porting gtk/gtkmm to win32 off and on.
If I have extra time, I can help with this effort. What kind of testing do
you need?

> > One thing I noticed is that, for some reason, gcc doesn't keep track
> > of the column number while it's parsing (well, the tree node doesn't
> > keep track anyway). I've considered amending this; I don't know if
> > this would be useful to introspector tho.
>
> you can turn that on in bison

Does it require modification of the parse tree to actually store the
column? Otherhwise, unless there's a parse error, I think it's just
ignored.

--craig