From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c32fe290813aec20 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news2.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local01.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:26:46 -0600 From: tmoran@acm.org Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: New Ada portable GUI Library? References: <478dc5cd$1@news.post.ch> X-Newsreader: Tom's custom newsreader Message-ID: <-badnczN8dX60RPanZ2dnUVZ_jednZ2d@comcast.com> Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:26:47 -0600 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 71.202.183.17 X-Trace: sv3-MEu93HxHjNDxoFfjUm6E6shlNso+4jRhwgWMZEqe0JKZETswAvGQe7CSUZx13yPz4KUr93kv3pQFoR8!BQEw8A1AeT6On7RI+y8MjTsHIJFVBR/vCIV/O6M6todc6lC/k8dp8qzNMC7vQCxchcDKxXZZrPAO!iVbNHydEZQ+ptzIrpK5HuO43QvFKwg== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.37 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:19436 Date: 2008-01-16T12:26:47-06:00 List-Id: >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?