On Mon, 2004-04-26 at 01:07, Benjamin Geer wrote:
> skaller wrote:
> > Portable C++ is easy to write.
> 
> I'm thinking of the differences between the Unix and the Win32 APIs. 
> That's one kind of library incompatibility that has caused programmers 
> no end of pain.  

I agree, but that isn't the fault of C or C++, anymore than
the collection of common libraries that are available 
and are hard to interface: the same problem will *always*
arise in any general purpose programming language which
is popular enough to inspire a large number of development efforts.

>  That's the sort of pain I think we can avoid in the 
> OCaml world by putting in place a reasonable community structure.

I don't see how we can avoid this pain.
We still have to deal with interfacing to existing libraries.

We can, perhaps, ameliorate some of the pain by a coordinated
effort at standardisation, but we are also going to get
extra pain that is not felt by C/C++ programmers, because
we actually have to create bindings for C/C++ libraries
to use them: C/C++ programmers do not.

This is one reason I think an Ocaml based wrapper generator
would be a good idea: the community can gain control over
the generator and make it work much better than a foreign
tool like SWIG.

Of course this isn't  complete solution, and it has no
real impact on designing a standard, fairly rich, algorithms
and data structures library.

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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