Re: C++ integration, again.

To: info-dylan@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: C++ integration, again.
From: Chris Double <chris@double.co.nz>
Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 17:15:02 -0400 (EDT)
Organization: None.
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"Shawn" <shawn@anarchy-arts.com> writes:

> COM is needed then in order to interface with C++ libs? The
> libraries would have to be rewritten using COM ?

It is helpful if this can be done otherwise you will have to write COM
wrappers for it.

> For my projects there are a lot of commercial rendering/game engines
> with HQ sound support available, mostly written in C++ (could you
> guess ?  :) ) one of them has 170K lines of C++ code, ick, no thank
> you for converting to Dylan.

Can you name some of the libraries? It might prove helpful in
providing advice. At least one Open Source C++ 3D library uses C++,
but I think they use the COM layout so FD's COM support might
work. CrystalSpace or something like that.

> From a previous thread HD was not able to interface with DX either,
> this would at least give me a sound system and peripheral support.

HD interfaces with DX without a problem. What you can't use is the
automatic COM wizard to import the DX 7 Visual Basic type
library. This uses appears to use a variant type that the wizard does
not handle. Manually writing com-dispatch and other COM macros in
Dylan allows you to use DX.

I have used dx-creator (http://www.dx-creator.com) to do some Dylan
game stuff. This is a 2D game library. They market it with a VB like
language with extensions for sprites. They also provide a C API. I
access the API from Dylan and it is a much nicer language to use than
their extended basic. I'll make the wrappers available from my site as
soon as I've updated to their new game engine with some of their
samples ported to Dylan. One nice feature of FD could be the use of
their remote debugging when working with full screen games. Debug on
one machine while the full screen game runs on another.

> Sorry for the rambling, just a late night wish that everyone coded
> in Dylan, or at least made C++ code that magically talked with it.

If you can provides names for some libraries you want to use and we'll
see if anything can be done.

Chris.
-- 
http://www.double.co.nz/dylan

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