Re: Binding or not binding

[Maciej Sobczak <no.spam@no.spam.com>]

Ali Bendriss wrote:

> 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 ?

One more thing (apart from those already mentioned) that you sometimes 
have to take into account is that some C libraries cannot be easily 
rewritten, because their internal working is either not documented, or 
even not exposed to public at all.

There are many projects that provide C API as part of the package and 
they don't document anything but the interface. In such a case the C 
library is just a black box and there is nothing really to rewrite.

A simple example that I have recently exercised on my own is a C client 
API to some database server. You don't know how it works internally (and 
you probably don't want to know), so it's not even clear what "rewriting 
in Ada" is supposed to mean. If it's open source then you can try to 
learn the details by reading the code (waste of time anyway), but what 
would you do if the source is closed? You have C API and nothing else. 
Bind to it.


-- 
Maciej Sobczak : http://www.msobczak.com/
Programming    : http://www.msobczak.com/prog/