[Pythonmac-SIG] Carbon bindings' future (was: Re: eliminating appscript-triggered Dock icon)

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 3 Apr, 2008, at 15:46, has wrote:
>
>
>> One of the nice things of the current Carbon bindings
>> is that a large portion of the API is just there and you probably
>> don't have
>> to write C code when you want to use an API.
>>
>> Sadly enough that's only true of API's that were present in OS9, but
>> the
>> idea stands: it would be nice to have complete bindings to the bits  
>> of
>> Carbon that still make sense.
>
> Yes, although I'd repeat my earlier suggestion that the most
> economically viable way to provide Carbon bindings would be to create
> ObjC wrappers for the Carbon APIs of interest. That way, any language
> with ObjC bindings, not to mention ObjC itself, can take advantage of
> these bindings for no extra effort.

I'm far from convinced that this is true. The bridgesupport tools  
don't target Objective-C exclusively but can also be used to wrap C  
API's. The only problem w.r.t. Carbon might be the arcane memory- 
management rules of Carbon. I'm not sure if that's relevant for the  
non-GUI bits of Carbon. Even then it should be possible to extend the  
bridgesupport tools a little with annotations that tell bridges that a  
specific type is a Carbon-style handle.

Even fixing bgen isn't that much work, once you understand the code.  
The problem is that bgen is a nearly vertical learning curve and Jack  
seems to be the only person that understands enough of bgen to be able  
to hack on it. I'm definitely in favor of ditching bgen and moving  
toward PyObjC-based wrappers.

Ronald


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