On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 23:26:17 +0100, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think C must remain a strong backend for Unicon. Of course, embedded applications and apps that are otherwise resource-constrained will benefit from this one the most. Optimisations in this area are certainly welcome...
I agree. The applications I have in mind are indeed the ones that are resource (speed-) constrained. However, I want to clarify that we are not simply talking about optimizations here. To the best of my knowledge, the (Un)Icon-C interface is, at this point, very rudimentary. One can only pass integers, reals, and strings as parameters of routines between Icon and C. I've written an extension that allows passing arrays of integers and reals back and forth, and which seems to work :-) but is not pretty. But there's much more work to be done.
However, it terms of usefulness to a more broad range of people, having a Unicon.Net implementation will guarantee full compatibility with other languages supported under .Net, as well as improved Windos interface, since that OS is slowly shifting towards .Net-only upper layers. Clearly, we don't want having multiple VMs that can not interoperate (JVM, iconx, .Net).
I don't really know that much about .net, but can't the same advantages be claimed about the Java platform? (Which I consider to be much more open than .net, by the way.) Also, on the subject of usefulness and compatibility, there are a lot of C libraries out there that Unicon could use with some work on the C interface. Same goes for Java, if that route were adopted.
A different issue is the amount of work that would be involved in a .net implementation. Again, I know very little about .net, but it seems to me that the necessary work would be quite a bit more than what would be required for C.
Finally, there is, at least for me, the whole issue about Windows and its philosophy ...
Kostas
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