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- Path: svnews.ubinet.ubs.com!ubszh!ubszh!jis
- From: ian.johnston@ubs.com (Johnston Ian (by ubsswop))
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.idl-pwave,comp.programming
- Subject: Re: C++, IDL design question
- Date: 31 Jan 1996 08:51:06 GMT
- Organization: UBS
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <4enahq$o1h@ubszh.fh.zh.ubs.com>
- References: <310E3D41.CBB@itsa.ucsf.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: nol2179.fh.zh.ubs.com
-
- In article <310E3D41.CBB@itsa.ucsf.edu>, Karl Young <kyoung@itsa.ucsf.edu> writes:
- |> I'm just starting the design of some medical imaging
- |> software. The lab I'm at has decided that using IDL
- |> will make code more usable among collaborators (there
- |> is currently a mountain of fairly unreadable C that
- |> will probably have to be rewritten) On the other hand,
- |> from my limited experience with C++ (just some coding;
- |> i.e. no extensive design experience) the project seems
- |> to scream out to be written in C++.
- |>
- |> So my question is; does it sound reasonable to design
- |> the project (Booch diagrams and whatever else...) to
- |> be coded up in C++ but allow a lot of the called functions
- |> to be written in IDL (e.g. the interface code and image
- |> processing stuff) ? (Ideally this should allow for fast
- |> prototyping, via IDL, and then perhaps recoding of the time
- |> critical stuff) Has anybody done anything like this and
- |> been happy/horrified with the results ?
-
- Why is IDL considered a good thing? Because in straight C you can
- program without prototypes?
-
- It doesn't sound very promising if you need to force your developers to
- use prototypes (and otherwise document interfaces) by using IDL...
-
- IDL won't buy you anything you couldn't get with prototypes. In addition,
- you won't be able to pass C++ class objects (by value, pointer or reference)
- into routines, as the IDL prototypes will only be able to deal with C
- structs.
-
- If you're happy to live with passing C structs around, then sure you can
- code in C++, but you're losing a lot of advantages.
-
- The only reason to use IDL with C++ is for RPCs.
-
- Ian
-
-