Re: tolua survey

[Vincent Penne <ziggy@...>]

Hi, I am currently writing a tool to analyse C++ code (possibly with 
user defined extensions) and generate user defined informations from it 
(something a bit similar to openc++, but output is not necessarily C++ 
code). This tool will be written with lua so that user extensions will 
be easy to write.

One application will be to generate bindings for scripting languages.

I have the feeling that all the problems you are pointing out when 
creating a binding from original header files may be solved by using 
correctly defined user extensions and rules (for example regexp rules on 
function names). However, my stuff is experimental and not yet 
functional, so we will see how it goes :)

Nick Trout wrote:

> Tolua can't make up its mind what you want to expose to the script
> though. I think you can already put (something like) 
>
> // TOLUA on 
> ... expose this bit ...
> // TOLUA off
>
> in your code, so you can do this in header files already. Personally I
> think your code just ends up looking a mess though. Downside is you have
> to go to 2 different files when the interface changes but its not
> exactly a major overhead. I suppose you could put something like #if 0
> // TOLUA on ... #endif in the same header - I've seen this with a fair
> amount of SWIG code.
>
> If you're binding to 3rd party code you end up commenting out lots of
> stuff or altering the syntax until it works (eg. glColor3f @ glColor) so
> its not practical to comment or reuse the header.
>
> The other issue is dependencies, you don't want to end up touching a
> header file repeatedly and recompiling all dependent files when it's the
> binding you're altering, not the interface client implementation.
>
> Nick
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