Re: Capability IDL

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 22:38 +0100, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> At Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:36:07 -0400,
> Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> > 
> > Marcus and Neal and I have been talking, which prompts me to ask a
> > question about Hurd IDL -- or more precisely, it prompts me to want to
> > learn how what the Hurd group has done may be different from what EROS
> > and Coyotos have done.
> 
> My opinion has been that we should ignore the issue until we are ready
> to thoroughly deal with it.  This is based on a number of observations
> from the Hurd on Mach including: 1) there are a small number of
> interfaces; 2) interfaces, once decided upon, rarely change; and 3)
> writing stub code is quick and relatively easy.  Moreover, with an API
> like L4 X.2, the stub code is even portable across architectures.

This was my initial expectation in the EROS project. It proved to be
wrong. The introduction of the IDL compiler was a huge productivity
gain, because it let us specify interfaces for subsystems that did not
yet exist.

shap