[Libreoffice] minutes of tech. steering call ...

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 10/21/2011 10:39 AM, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi Kevin,
>
> On Thu, 2011-10-20 at 20:06 -0400, Kevin Hunter wrote:
>>    From the wiki page, one of the concerns is "binary incompatibility".  I
>> assume this is in reference to extensions?
>
> 	Sure; of course we only export a reasonably small ABI, the 'ure' (big
> chunks of which are in-lined C++ methods that call SAL_CALL C functions
> that we havn't changed and should cross-compile nicely). The
> C++ helper classes (it is hoped) due to windows direct linking, and a
> different ABI anyway shouldn't conflict.
>
> 	My hope was(is) that UNO can shine here (with some tweaks) as a
> bridging technology between the ABIs - at some fairly minimal
> performance cost. At least, given Stephan's expertise&  a little
> testing, it "might just work". That would of course mean shipping some
> duplicate legacy MSVC++ compiled libraries, but ... surely do-able.

It would not suffice to ship them, one would also need to build them. 
Kind of back to square one.

>> Question: is there merit to moving toward an enforced sub-process model
>> for extensions ?
>
> 	It is an interesting idea; of course in theory UNO makes this easy, in
> reality - I would scream and run away from cross-process component
> usage. Debugging reference leaks / cycles / etc. is bad enough
> in-process, never-mind cross-process; or worse between many (external)
> components.

Note that freshly installed extensions *are* routinely loaded off to an 
external uno process.

-Stephan