Re: networking support?

[Oliver Kowalke <oliver.kowalke@gmx.de>]

Maciej Sobczak wrote:

> On 18 Gru, 13:47, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de> wrote:
> 
>> How would your program benefit from first wrapping system
>> functions (that use C conventions) in C++ classes only for
>> having to match Ada's O-O types and C++'s O-O types in
>> a second step?
>> Seems like an artificial setup to me.
> 
> Except that a lot of things in the C world (especially in the system
> APIs) are defined in header files as preprocessor constants, optional
> or even unofficial structure fields or field order within a struct -
> all this means that the binary layout of data structures is a big
> question mark. This problem is particularly notorious with network
> services.
> There is no way to reasonably interface with all this mess from Ada
> and having a wrapper layer that fixes some of this optional/unofficial/
> ordering stuff for the Ada part is a valid option.
> Now the question is how thick this adapter layer should be - and here
> a layer that does a bit of lifetime management or error reporting in
> addition to just parameter passing is also a valid solution.
> Then you might discover that all the work that is done in this
> adapting layer can be reused in C++ projects as well (it is a low-
> hanging fruit, so why not benefit from it?) and you end up with a
> regular C++ library that encapsulates some system services and is used
> from the Ada program.
> There is nothing artifical in it - it starts with a fundamental
> feasibility issues and ends up with simple economy.

my intention was to call some boost libraries (www.boost.org).
I'm not sure if C++-templates can be accessed/used by Ada.

regards,
Oliver