[offtopic] marshalling

linas@linas.org linas@linas.org
Tue, 2 Jan 2001 14:50:24 -0600 (CST)


This is way off-topic, but ...

It's been rumoured that Tyson Dowd said:
>
> (Actually M$ has a lot more in the whole language infrastructure thing,
> since their VM supports multiple language interoperation at the data
> level on the same machine -- no marshalling required.  

Well, that's kind-of what we do with g-wrap, and its kind-of what's
behind one of the original early claims of gnome's ORBit: that with
orbit, a call on the same machine would be roughly as fast as an
ordinary subroutine call. (I don't know if they kept that promise).

Here's the question: if one writes a soap dtd/schema in the M$
framework, it will then auto-generate language bindings for several 
languages? (i.e. they treat the  soap dtd/schema as an IDL for 
all practical purposes? OR did they invent some new IDL language?)

------------------
I also gather that microsoft's strategic direction with .net is to
control the VM: they have thier one standard true VM, while the rest
of the world has to live with multiple incompatible VM's (i.e. the 
Java vm, the perl VM, the guile VM, ...)  

And, of course, the corrolary question: should I feel bad about this? 
Other than integrated tools, and backwards compatibility with visual
basic and java, what, exactly, does .net offer that I can't get
today?

--linas