Re: Towards guile-gtk 0.18

[Keith Wright <kwright@tiac.net>]

> From: Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
> > > 
> > > > It turns out that a full half of the executable was due to
> > > > automatically generated RPC stubs.
> > 
> > Ouch!  That hurts.  I wrote that RPC stub generator.  It seemed
> > like a good idea at the time.
> 
> Sorry!  I forget who it was who told me this.  It was someone on the
> Mach project at CMU, way back in 1990-92 or something.

I'm not offended, ey was probably right.  I don't know what
they might have done later, but at the time (about 1985)
it was just a quick thing to translate Pascal procedure
declarations into stubs to assign the parameters to
a record, call the message send, receive the reply, and
assign the record fields back to the parameters.  One procedure,
one stub.  It was better than writing it by hand, but
since every kernel call is done this way it deserved more
attention than it ever got.  Unfortunately, optimising
this was not seen as the fast-track to tenure.  As long
as it worked nobody was eager to make it top priority.

A few weeks ago I started looking through the OMG definition
of IDL and translating it to S-expressions and Scheme data
types.  The idea was that the Scheme IDL compiler would just
translate to data which a Scheme procedure could interpret
at run time to marshall arguments for a CORBA call, keeping
the code compact.  In view of the discussion on this list of
GOOPS vs Pure Scheme, YASOS, ILU, etc. that project is
canceled for lack of interest.

-- 
     -- Keith Wright  <kwright@free-comp-shop.com>

Programmer in Chief, Free Computer Shop < http://www.free-comp-shop.com >
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