Sven Barth wrote:
We have three windows platforms with MSVC and I don't know how many
platforms where GCC or LLVM is the main compiler. I'm not going for
popularity here, just for the majority of platforms.
Looking at the options
1 use swig architecture to parse the C++ source code/headers and extract
Pascal bindings - either by a rewrite or adapting the current effort
2 accommodate (and maintain) various compiler idiosyncracies
from a distance... I'd say option 1 would be the easiest and best
maintainable?
- SWIG already provides infrastructure to parse the source files
- People using Delphi would probably also be interested in
fixing/patching bugs
- On top of the previous point: changes in C/C++ standards/formats would
not be our concern so much because those will be dealt with by the wider
SWIG community
- Of course, if swig is ever extended to support more languages, we get
that for free
Of course I understand it's very attractive to have everything in house
and native in FPC, but I suspect the effort needed to develop/maintain
it may outweigh that...
Important point for variant 2: less overhead. Using swig you first
flatten the API and then unflatten it again into Object Pascal classes.
For callbacks you have also wrappers (which are hidden from you). In
case of cppclass you don't have all this, because code will be called
directly.
However, I'm reminded of the flurry of activity when SCADA malware was
found in the wild a couple of years ago: it was decided fairly early
that it had probably been compiled with MS tools, but inspection of the
calling convention suggested that it was non-standard and it took a lot
of head scratching before people decided which compiler/linker and what
pragmata had been used.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
