IDL language

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 5:59 AM, Mark Doffman
<mark.doffman at codethink.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm afraid I don't understand the point of the typelib.

You seem to have a different meaning of typelib in mind than I do. I
just mean any machine-readable interface description that can be
located in some standard location, and used to generate code,
statically or dynamically at runtime. IDL and the (already existing)
XML format both qualify, other examples would be gobject-introspection
typelibs or Qt's metaobject.

I know COM-like systems refer to the typelib as the "compiled" IDL,
and I don't exclude that, but conceptually I think the current
introspection XML is the same thing. The important thing about a
typelib is that it's a machine-accessible description of an interface.

There are lots of ways to get to a typelib that's installed, whether
writing it directly, getting it by scanning Java or C++, or converting
it from IDL. It doesn't really matter.

dbus already pretty much has typelibs in XML format, and the
discussion here is whether to allow authoring those in a separate
corba idl type of syntax.

Havoc