Re: [Caml-list] Generating C stubs

[Florian Hars <florian@hars.de>]

Jérôme Marant wrote:
>   I thought that CamlIDL was targeted at COM and interprocess communication,
>   wasn't it?

Yeah, the CamlIDL web site is one of the worst marketing blunders in the
history of modern computing in insinuating that it is exclusively targeted
at Windows-only programs. Unix only enters the picture as an afterthought
further down the page where everyone who is not looking for a Windows
solution has long since stopped reading. (Apart form the fact that no
sane programmer in full possession of his mental abilities would use
something with "IDL" in its name for a task as simple as linking to a
shared library :-))

Why not start the page with something like
"CamlIDL generates stub code to use C libraries and C++ classes
from Objective Caml from high level definitions. Under Windows it can
also provide COM bindings." 

And maybe the Ocaml manual should mention the existence of CamlIDL in
the introduction of the chapter about interfacing C with Ocaml, like
(stealing parts from the lower half of the website) "The following chapter
documents the low level interface between C and Objective Caml. For
practical programming tasks it might be more appropiate to use a tool
like CamlIDL that operates on a higher level of abstraction and takes
care of details such as those pesky Val_xxx and Xxx_val macros, proper
registration of GC roots, the different calling conventions from bytecode
and from native-code, etc."

Yours, Florian Hars.
-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners