Re: Interfacing GALib to Swarm

[Nelson Minar]

Making Swarm work with GALib is a nice idea. It will be a fair amount
of work, though.

>Unfortunately, it is written in C++. The NeXT book on Objective C
>claims that Objective C can be used in conjunction with C++. I have
>not been able to do this successfully in the gnu compiler.

gcc does not support Objective C / C++ together.

Are there any good GA libraries written in plain C? That would be your
easiest course.

>provide an interface between swarm and a GALib application. I have
>chosen the latter. That way if GALib (or swarm) is later improved,
>only that interface need be updated.

This is a nice idea, something we always wanted to do with Swarm. I
recommend making the actual communication layer between the two
processes be as abstract as possible. Or at least, avoid named pipes.
They aren't reliable across Unices, and I don't think they're
supported in Windows NT. It's probably better to use a TCP/IP socket -
that way, you could even run the GAlib part on another CPU. Another
option is to use shared memory, but again that's not very portable.

Defining the interface between the two processes will be quite tricky.
I think there will be some serious efficiency issues as well.


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