[Mono-list] IDL, Bonnobo, Corba and Mono

[Miguel de Icaza]

> It might be a little heavy, but DIA needs to have a better and more
> fine tuned API. The Python GIMP-style Plugin does not cut it to be
> honest.

Yes.  Many applications could use a better IDL definition.  Part of the
motivation for building Mono, was that it was very hard to design nice
CORBA apis purely from C.  It is completely possible, but you required
people to understand way too many things.    

What we wanted to do all this time was to allow people to focus more on
the problem they were solving (in this case DIA) instead of having to
learn everything about corba, interfaces, wrapping, object activation,
processing patterns and so on.  And C# and .NET seemed to fit that
description really well.

> I guess the Important is to check any IDL against a number of compilers
> and make sure that it is compilable by all.

IDL is a generic term that is sometimes confused.  I liked what you
originally used: `OMG IDL', because it refers to the CORBA version of
it. 

> The thing is that it really confusing for me just how many different
> interfaces there are.. I feel like i have to interface to the
> interfaces just to maintain some form of independence.... 

Do you have a particular question about the interfaces?

> I guess CIL will provide some form of better interface that Miguel was
> talking about in the positional paper on mono.

Exactly.

> Anyway, thanks for the information, I will start playing with bonobo.
> 
> There must be a way to be able to make a high-speed stream of data
> interface across.

Depending on your task at hand, you might want to look at different
approaches.  Out-of-band data has been used for a long time in RPC
systems (Mach's Interface Generator made this explicit in the interface,
other systems have to implement their own hacks for transport).

For instance, you can use the interface to exchange a shared memory
handle and pass information there.

Miguel