[offtopic] marshalling

[linas@linas.org]

It's been rumoured that Tyson Dowd said:
> Personally I tend to think they are becoming an ASP, and they want to be
> the gatekeeper of all the cool services people will pay $14.95 a month to
> access.

I would second that notion.


> There's one technical feature of .NET that tends to get lost in the
> spin.  This might give you an idea of the level of interoperability
> you can get.  It's possible (indeed, it's simple) for a class written in
> one language to inherit from a class written in another language. 
> Since there a single root class (Object) this happens all the time.
> This is full object orientation, virtual methods, implementation
> inheritance, you name it.  Accessing a field or calling a method of a
> type written in another language is as easy as if it were one written in
> your language.  

Looks beautiful. However, isn't there dirt under that carpet?

How does the 'class factory' get the 'meta-class description'?

I know of only a few ways of getting the meta information:
-- use SWIG: it parses C header files and tries to guess.
-- use g-wrap & scheme forms to specify the interface
-- use (corba) IDL and a stub generator to get language bindings
-- write an XML schema that specifies the object.

The last three options all require extra work on the part of the 
interface designer.  The first option only works automatically 
in the simplest cases, and needs hand-massaging for anything harder.

The way you wrote up your description makes it sound like Microsoft
has somehow magically solved the meta-class problem, presumably
by building a super-duper-ultra-smart version of SWIG.  Right?


--linas