FW: Re: winequartz.drv Mac OS X UI discontinued?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On Thursday July 09, 2009 5:32 PM Chris Robinson wrote:

>> With the same argument you could say that writing COM objects has to 
>> be done in C++. Yet Wine has lots and lots of COM code written all in 
>> standard C.
>
>It has to, because the class vtable layout and calling convention can 
>be different in Windows than how the host system's compiler will generate
it.
>COM objects have to interface with existing Windows code, and so need 
>to be setup in memory in a specific way.

Not entirely sure where your "It has too" is pointed at. If it is about COM
code being written in C then it is not entirly true. All the MS examples
about COM nowadays are completely in C++ and some newer API headers seem to
not even include the C part. But of course that code is meant to be compiled
with Visual C++ and I could see trouble trying to get the exact binary
layout with gcc. This is maybe not such a problem with newest gcc but was
certainly a problem with older versions.

>If OSX will always have Obj-C support, and the Obj-C code can be 
>restricted to OSX-only code, then the only sticking point, in my eyes, 
>would be how maintainable it is. After all, if only one or two people 
>can work with Obj-C code, it can bit-rot that much more quickly.

I think this is in fact the major issue here. There is certainly interest in
starting such a project but maintaining it is a completely different beast.

Rolf Kalbermatter