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With XMas nearing, I thought it was time I made my yearly wish to Santa - that he would let his elves use C++ in WINE.<BR>
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(Just in case, you did not know Santa's email address, it's 'julliard[at]winehq.org', and you can make your wishes at 'wine-devel[at]winehq.com'..)<BR>
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You see, Santa was always so good - he answered people's prayers and got together his obedient elves to run Win32 on Non-Windows platforms!<BR>
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However, soon many of his elves found out that technologies like MFC, WTL, ATL, COM, DCOM, COM+ and other MS bloops were getting too complex to be implemented using plain C, and thus developments in those areas were soon in limbo.<BR>
But that could be solved using yet another language called C++ - if only Santa would let it be.<BR>
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Oh please Santa ! Let us adultrate WINE with C++, please.<BR>
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It's not that we will rewrite everything in C++ once we get the green signal - things like the loader, scheduler, and most of the Win32 SDK does not need C++ at all, but what about MFC, COM, OLE ?<BR>
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Not that I expect to compile native MFC source using WineLib, but at least we can write the runtimes so that native MFC apps can atleast run under WINE ?<BR>
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DirectX oozes of classes,inheritance,abstaction and everything C++ as does OLE, COM and already our implementations have structure object pointers running wild, whereas encapsulation would have done away with it !<BR>
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As a simple explanation, we might take our 'This' hack wheras C++ would let have us use it as 'this' without even us worrying about it !<BR>
Also, there are many places in shell32, ole and shwlapi (I cannot comment on DirectX source as I do not have a graphics base at all ..) where initializing a few member variables from a constructor would have done away with some redundancy.<BR>
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Most of the time we are passing around multilevel pointers when a simple reference would have done:<BR>
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For example a call like<BR>
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Stream_LoadString( stm, unicode, &This->sString ); [To 'static HRESULT Stream_LoadString( IStream* stm, BOOL unicode,LPWSTR *pstr )']<BR>
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can be made to a simple<BR>
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Stream_LoadString(sString);<BR>
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using C++ if we had the prototype rewritten to 'static HRESULT Stream_LoadString(LPWSTR& pstr )' and makin
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