[9276] in The GTK GIMP ToolKit mailing list archive
[gtk-list] Re: Why is gtk+ written in C?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andreas Kostyrka)
Wed Oct 14 05:48:52 1998
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 13:50:51 +0200 (CEST)
From: Andreas Kostyrka <andreas@rainbow.studorg.tuwien.ac.at>
To: gtk-list@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: <19981013181407.21220.rocketmail@send1d.yahoomail.com>
Resent-From: gtk-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: gtk-list@redhat.com
On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Eric Harlow wrote:
>
> Isn't C++ portable?
> Couldn't GTK have been written C++ with bindings to other languages?
The problem is that not all other languages are written in C++.
(Or offer C++ access features.)
So in the best case it would be:
write C wrapper functions for the C++ stuff.
write language X wrapper for the C stuff.
Examples, I know personally, are TOM (which allows to embed C code
directly, but NOT C++), ...
Leaving thin mundane stuff, there are some other problems:
-) Consider a library xyz that contains in fact the interpreter for
language xyz. It's written in C and compiled with the C compiler.
-) Consider now a C++ library that uses callbacks (GUI stuff usually
does):
C++ (C++ compiled) main function
C (C compiled) interpreter main loop
C++ (C++ compiled) GUI toolkit event loop.
C (C compiled) callback (into the xyz language)
C++ (C++ compiled) some manipulator function.
Now NOTHING in in the ANSI C standard defines that C++ exception are
propageted across C code. So forget about exception.
-) Additionally, you have to consider that almost all newer languages
come with some kind of GC. Again it's probably easier to interface with
C as with C++ which already comes with some idea of
constructors/destructors.
Andreas
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