Re: What can I do to help? (conclusions)

[Clinton Ebadi]

On Thursday 03 October 2002 13:14, Evan Prodromou wrote:
>     * A module for gdbm and/or Berkeley DB, with a mechanism for
>       transparent storage

I thought this already existed somewhere? If it does (I think it does) it 
doesn't work and needs to be fixed anyway.

>     * Guile SOAP bindings (using guile-www as HTTP carrier)

I think Guile needs CORBA and DCOP bindings first. Almost now Free Software 
uses SOAP, so there is no real reason to support it. On the other hand, CORBA 
would help greatly with working with GNOME programs, and DCOP would enable 
the use of Guile to script KDE apps using their DCOP interfaces.

>     * URL parser module (string -> (protocol, server, path, fragment))

guile-www has this in the (www url) module.

> I think in general it should be a goal to have Guile modules that wrap
> _all_ the libraries on ftp.gnu.org. Another is to have modules for all
> major Internet protocols. That should keep us all busy for the next
> two years. B-)

A good idea would be to work on SWIG (http://www.swig.org) to make it not use 
GH anymore, do automatic garbage collection of wrapped objections (now you 
have to use two procedures SWIG adds, new and delete, and it doesn't GC any 
SWIG object...), and support GOOPS shadow classes for C++. Making SWIG 
objects GC-able would be really great (unless it was already fixed in the 
last release, I know two releases ago it wasn't). If SWIG used GOOPS shadow 
classes and generic procedures, it would be much nicer to use too. Then a 
large number of libraries could very easily be wrapped without much trouble 
(usually just modifying the header file of the library slightly makes it 
usable with SWIG).

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