----- Original Message -----
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca To: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at Cc: pd-list@iem.at; IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig@iem.at Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 11:44 AM Subject: Re: [PD] C++ for reusable dsp lib - or better use C?
Le 2012-02-22 à 09:37:00, Hans-Christoph Steiner a écrit :
STL, Qt, and Boost are all only used in C++.
Qt is also available for Ada, C#, D, Haskell, Harbour, Java, Lisp, Lua, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, QML, R, Ruby, Scheme, ... and even Tcl.
That's great news.
Would you mind giving me the link to the stable, actively maintained library that makes Qt available for Tcl? I look forward to testing it out.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29#Bindings
now for the others...
STL and Boost are different. While Qt's interface (API) consists of features that are in many languages (or have very close equivalents), STL uses several features that are quite C++-specific and at odds with how other programming languages work. Other languages have already their own library covering the same ground as the STL, though usually in a quite different way and usually not that efficiently. Boost goes further in the direction of using all the C++ features that exist and it's at least as impossible to port.
This shows a rift between libraries with least-common-denominator interfaces that are somewhet easy to port to many languages (incl Qt), and libraries that are deeply entrenched in a language to get the best of it. The latter is more common in C++, because least-common-denominator tend to be a same small set of data types (int,float,string,array), basic OOP features, and that's all, while C++ has long expanded beyond « C with Classes » to include templates and stuff.
Templates can't be easily wrapped because their point is to generate code on-the-fly as the programmer is programming. Wrapping that kind of library means reducing the flexibility and/or efficiency, by precompiling some use-cases of templates, and forbidding the rest. Otherwise, you'd need something that can recompile C++ templates on-the-fly in another language, and I haven't seen that yet.
Actually, one can do similar tricks in plain C with macros, but those same caveats appear as with templates.
| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC _______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list