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Re: Functional Developer UNICODE support + source?

Rob Myers <robmyers@mac.com> writes:

> On Wednesday, July 25, 2001, at 12:30  pm, Mark Jordan wrote:
> 
> > I'd ask for the rules, but the complex job of writing Dylan CFFI's and
> > no unicode has put me off using Dylan at all. What I really need is
> > a CPPFFI to interface to existing C++ class libraries.  Any ideas on
> > how this might be done?
> 
> C++ compiler manufacturers would need to agree on common name
> mangling, vtable layout and exception handling conventions and they'd
> then all need to implement them. This would allow C++ code compiled
> with different versions of the same compiler, or C++ compilers from
> different vendors, to call C++ code that isn't statically compiled
> into the same compilation unit. It would then be relatively trivial to
> allow other languages to join the party.

As I understand it, C++ (either by standard or methodology) actually
_encourages_ the divergence of mangling techniques per vendor, so as
to render such an idea virtually useless (or at least very hard and
C++ vendor specific).  I heard this second-hand, so I don't know if
it is common practice or actually mentioned in the C++ standard.  The
rationale is apparently that disparate mangling would reduce the
chance of a name clash between vendors (not that I've ever heard of
any two C++ vendors linking programs together :-).

So in the CL world we speak to C++ as directly as possible by their
only real direct interface: extern "C", or indirectly through COM,
Corba, etc.

-- 
Duane Rettig          Franz Inc.            http://www.franz.com/ (www)
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