[orbitcpp-list] Comments about o2cpp

[Phil d. <ph...@us...>]

Hi Andreas,

I've got a couple of comments about o2cpp:

1) Licensing issues: Is your runtime LGPL? I could only find the GPL
license in your tarball.

2) A little bug report: GCC 2.95.2 won't compile the basic example
because the ORBit C skels declare an 'in' string as const char*, where
as o2cpp's stubs declare it without the const. The compiler barfs on the
epv function pointers.

3) There's a lot of code in the runtime. I haven't had a lot of time to
look at it in detail, but it looks like a lot of the ORBit-C stuff is
duplicated in the orb layer (interface hash lookups, poa implementation,
reference counting, etc..).
I've already made this mistake in ORBit-C++, and am now in the middle of
rewriting the runtime code to take advantage of the built-in binary
compatibility between the C and C++ language mappings. 

If you give the C and C++ types the same binary footprint, then you can
convert between them with a reinterpret cast. No need for hash lookups
to identify the stub factory, and no need to deal with C++ object
lifecycles in the stubs/skeletons and for a new ref counting
implementation. The code size is much smaller and the marshalling code
is almost non-existant (the only thing that requires stub code at all is
marshalling exceptions from the environment structures).

4) Your indentation style is a little bizarre. If we do merge code I'd
be a little concerned that it would be off-putting to other developers
(just as my use of python was to you). Have you tried K&R, stroustrop or
any of the other styles?
Do you have emacs or indent settings for your C++ indentation style -
maybe we could automate the translation between your style and one of
the 'standards' (I don't care which one) before it goes into CVS?

Cheers,

Phil.