Re: RFC: Using Standard C++ library components in Octave

[Greg Troxel]

I'll throw out a perhaps crazy thought --- which I'm not really
advocating, just suggesting be thought about for a few minutes ---
which is to use glib instead.  Glib is in C, and runs on lots of
places (as the foundation for gtk+, gimp, and Gnome).

Glib has many of the usual list, tree etc. data structures, and an
object-oriented mentality, particularly with glib-2.0.
Glib objects could be contained in a C++ class just as STL objects
could be contained.

There has been talk of integrating guile in the past, and using glib
points out the possibility of using the
guile/guile-gobject/ORBit/bonobo nexus.  It would be cool to have
octave available via CORBA as a Gnome desktop component and therefore
usable as a plugin for other programs.  Making octave a gnome desktop
component would require linking with glib (and many other things), but
wouldn't require that internal data structures be in any particular
format, so these issues are not really coupled.  That said, using glib
would be a slight cultural shift in the gnome-hat direction.

The downside of glib is that it probably changes more often than STL,
but it appears to do so fairly slowly.  I would find requiring glib to
be less of a burden than installing gcc 3.2, although really either is
pretty easy.

        Greg Troxel <address@hidden>