IDL language

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 15:19 +0100, Matthew Johnson wrote:
> On Fri May 08 10:03, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Second, I believe that people can just do things like
> > 
> >  @org.freedesktop.DBus.GLib.Async
> >  SomeMethod(in int32 foo, out string bar);
> 
> I dislike having binding-specific annotations whereby you have to edit
> the IDL before converting it to stubs in your language. It's hardly
> _independent_ at that point...

Yeah, I agree. We should probably even disallow things like this.

> How easy will it be to provide support for other languages?
> Particularly, if I want to write a pure-Java parser (people dislike the
> fact that bits of my toolchain need unixy stuff as it is)

Sure, I think that's completely reasonable - and, sure, there are much
better tools for building parsers in Java than e.g. lex/yacc.

So, I think we just need to precisely document the IDL language (once we
have agreed on it) and I haven't gotten to that yet. It's a well-known
thing to specify languages so I don't expect it to be too much effort
since I, for one, want the IDL language to be very small and purposely
targeting D-Bus only. 

We probably also want to share test cases so working on a common format
for input, expected errors, expected warnings etc. would be great as
well.

    David