Re: New Ada portable GUI Library?

[tmoran@acm.org]

>First of all: all OO systems are incompatible. Sad but true. They use
>different name mangler, different class tags (also called virtual
>function tables) and so on.
  If you just want to save the grunt work of writing a lot of
pragma Imports, a program can read a typelib (Windows) and produce
Ada code.  I did that for the Google Earth API.  David Botton did
that and IIRC his program is available from AdaCore.
  But if you want to make something really helpful to an Ada programmer,
you need to create a thick binding design that has classes, tasks,
exceptions, etc that "fits" Ada so you aren't just writing C code in Ada
syntax, and you need to learn about the ins-and-outs-and bugs in the C
code you are going to call, so your Ada binding can be well-specified and
implement what it says it implements.  It takes a lot of work, there are
more people creating new C APIs than there are Ada programmers to design
bindings for them, and there's very little market.  Why do you suppose
that of the multiple Windows etc Ada thick bindings, so few are still
actively supported?