IDL language

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 16:19 +0100, Matthew Johnson wrote:
> On Fri May 08 11:14, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Everyone who write non-trivial D-Bus services with non-private
> > interfaces already extends D-Bus introspection XML (we have seen this:
> > Telepathy, ConsoleKit, DeviceKit-*), this is just an effort to
> > consolidate all this work.
> 
> Without necessarily suggesting that your IDL is bad, I'd like to say
> that this is not a reason to drop XML, merely to standardise the
> features which people are adding with their dialects. 

Sure, D-Bus introspection XML is immensely useful at run-time and you
can't really remove it - that's, AFAICT, why it was invented in the
first place (e.g. a way for dynamic languages to call into a service).

Using D-Bus introspection XML as an IDL as people are today, however, is
what I'm opposed to. It's not really what it was intended for. And I
think it's a mistake to officially say it is.

     David