[Dynamite] wiki back (hurray)

[Guy Slater]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2000, Ian Holmes wrote:

> Thanks Guy for letting us know about the wiki.
> 
> It will be good to have you "back" Ewan, in the meantime if either of you
> get a chance to glance at this latest version of my IDL-to-C munger (now a
> 90K Perl abomination) then your comments would be very useful.
> 
> It generates the object wrapper code & appropriate header files. IDL's
> sequence<X> still has a lot of functions unimplemented, but I think this
> approach can save us a lot of pain in the long run.
> 
> Run "idlstubs.pl --overview" for an overview.
> 
> I suggest you try it on one of the three IDL files attached, or write your
> own quick "MyModule.idl" to test it (module name has to be in MyModule
> format)
> 
> Guy I am particularly keen to see what you think of the C it generates
> (admittedly I haven't compiled it yet, no standard header files are
> #included or anything, and some code is missing...)
> 
> actually that goes for Ewan too -- feedback on the way the code looks
> would be great....
> 
> Ian
> 

Ian,

I've had an initial look at this and it looks very cool indeed
- this should save weeks.

I can't really comment on the perl, but the output looks good. 
(BTW, it hangs on adhah@sanger (perl 5.004_04),
 but was ok on ics-linux2 (perl 5.005_03) - no idea why).

Is Euclid another Berkeley ref ?
What is the euclid_defs.h file for ?

The main thing that strikes me looking at the code is that we need
to decide how much of glib we are going to use.  I've been using
it for the code I'm writing for Ensembl, and like it a lot.

ie, using g_new and g_malloc not malloc,
          g_new0 and g_malloc0 not calloc, 
          g_print not fprintf

There is some advocacy on this issue at
http://www.gtk.org/faq/gtkfaq-8.html#ss8.4
I think this makes sense, particularly for memory management.

(Also, I wouldn't use 'ditto' anywhere in the comments ;)

Any ideas about how we should write makefiles for this lot ?
manual/automake ?

Guy.
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