Re: Binding or not binding

[Jeffrey Creem <jeff@thecreems.com>]

Ali Bendriss wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Could you please first excuse me if my past and maybe future posting in this 
> group were (will be) sometimes awkward. But I will really like to be more 
> active using and promoting Ada.
> 
> I was really interested by the thread about "How come Ada isn't more popular?"
> 
> I would like to have your opinion about the best way to go in the future, 
> and in particular if binding a C library is really the way to go.
>   
> When we talk about reuse does it mean reusing the libraries done in an other 
> language ? 
> Re-implementing zlib in Ada for example. Is it a waist of time ?
> How to choose ? where to start writing in Ada ?
>  
> If I need some compression lib like jpeg2k for example which way to go ?
> I would love to be able to manipulate some DICOM image format in Ada for 
> example. Most of the actual project implementing the DICOM standard are in 
> C++ and java. Is it only a question of money (project funding) ? 
> 
> Thanks for your feedback in the professional and the hobbyist side.
> 

It depends on your goals. In general, the conventional wisdom is that 
you should simply bind to existing libraries and as a general rule, this 
usually makes sense. However, having said that, the net is full of 
libraries in a variety of languages implemented natively in that 
language and the existence of these native libraries is sometimes what 
makes people call those languages "good".

So, if my goal is to just get some work done, and I need the 
functionality of some library, and the functionality is non-trivial, 
I'll usually go the binding route.

If I want functionality and existing libraries don't provide it and/or 
provide it in a manner that is not really what I want, I start to 
consider writing a native version.

Sometimes dealing with either the build process, license terms, compiler 
requirements of an existing library is nearly as much work as just 
writing and maintaining a native version. Finding this tipping point 
will depend on a lot of factors but certainly for functionality <~ 100 
lines of code, the intellectual overhead of a binding and another 
language is usually not worth it.

Having something like SWIG working and well understood for Ada would 
certainly help bring bindings along.

Work is progressing in that area but I have not really looked at 
progress recently.

http://gnuada.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gnuada/trunk/projects/swig-1.3.29/