From: Victor A. Wagner, Jr. [mailto:vawjr@rudbek.com]
It's my personal belief that Microsoft _still_ intends to bury C++ because they don't control it.
Why can't they want to bury it because it's a fundamentally unproductive enterprise language? Certainly, that's how I feel about it. Why do you think I'm jumping ship to Python? Anyways, I think Microsoft might have been interested in any higher level garbage collected language, "in principle." But Java was Sun's bid to dethrone Microsoft, so of course they couldn't swallow *that* ! So what they decided upon was the (correct) idea of a higher level garbage collected language, but something they own. Witness C# and .NET. And, because these things were created later than Java, some improvements were made over Java. The main one being, not tying your hands "in the Java way" about what your environment is. Interop is basically a better idea than Java's "one platform everywhere" idea. Of course, when one takes a deep look at .NET, it's all plenty interop as long as your problems look like C#! I hope that changes some as .NET evolves. A real proof of pudding will be if we ever get fully viable Python .NET speaking some future version of IL. Then we'll know the Microsoft R&D guys were serious and prevailed in the internal power struggles.
One distinct advantage boost has over the current PythonNet implementation is that you can go "either way" with boost.
Yes, but at the cost of thinking about everything as C++. I'm moving to Python for the simplicity. Hence, bridging through Managed C++ sounds a lot better to me. I don't believe I need a 2-way bridge for what I'm trying to do, hope I'm not mistaken. A friend of mine also pointed out that I could wrap a few parts of my C++ classes in C, then use the Python/C API. Depends on what I need to expose. It might work in my case, I need some low-level bitmap routines exposed. I don't need Python to do any of the heavy lifting, just to trigger stuff. Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA 20% of the world is real. 80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.