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XPLC Component System Looking For Design Peer-Review?

Posted by Cliff on from the pick-it-to-pieces dept.

Pierre Phaneuf asks: "The XPLC project, an open source, portable component system focused on high performance, is looking at leveraging the open source community to do a peer-review of its design. An article on Advogato describes the design of XPLC. What do you see there that you like? What do you think is wrong? Any ideas or suggestions?"

2 comments

  1. Generality in languages is important by StandardDeviant · · Score: 3

    Mind you, I'm not really what you would call a win32 developer (I wrote a bug tracking system using IIS/ASP/Jscript once). But from what I looked at COM, and heard through the grapevine at "Company X", was that the coolest thing about it was that it could be used from so many languages (both the component itself and the caller).

    C and C++ are probably the most common, but I saw VB (ick) and ASP code calling COM objects very frequently, and that's not the limit. This is pretty neat, like being able to call an .so from _anywhere_, without having to roll your own wrapper (a la SWIG for perl, python, tcl et al).

    So anyway, my .02 USD is to at least attempt a design that is flexible enough that C++ isn't the only supported language. I realize you're a game shop and as such don't have oodles of spare time, so it's OK if all it is implemented in at first is C++. As long as some crazed hacker like me can come along at some point and add perl support, no one gets hurt! ;-)

    Thirdly, come on, you asked for "any ideas" on /.! What were you thinking?! Ha, I bet somebody is going to ask if his pantsObject can call the hotGritsObject using the nataliePortmanIsFine pattern. :-)

    Anyway, good luck, it looks like a cool project.


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    1. Re:Generality in languages is important by Pierre+Phaneuf · · Score: 2

      As you said, we're implementing C++ only at first, but we have an IDL compiler on the roadmap that will enable someone to come and hack this.

      Ideally, the IDL compiler will generate header files that would embed the type information of the interface, but it could also temporarily be used to generate stubs à la SWIG.

      But the goal is to have enough reflection to make it possible to handle new interfaces at runtime in scripted languages!

      Yeah, ok, maybe asking for ideas on Slashdot isn't so hot, but hey, there's enough people reading it that there ought to be something good to get (statistically speaking)! ;-)

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