Friday, March 17, 2006

The Gnu Eiffel Wrapper Libraries Collection

Paolo "Tybor" Redaelli has applied to the Gna! Project for them to host his project to build a collection of wrapper libraries for SmartEiffel, released under the LGPL.

Paolo already has some code to start this project with - he has worked on wrappers for GTK+ 2.x and has partially implemented wrappers for the Gnu Scientific Library and the GnomeVFS filesystem abstraction library.

David Brown plans to add a wrapper for Sqlite3. Cyril Adrian has suggested that Paolo's project should use SmartEiffel's plugin mechanism because "users have less things to manually describe".

Paolo concludes with a couple of quotes that reflect his opinion that working but incomplete code is better than grand plans but nothing working:
one of my favorite mantras is "perfect is the enemy of good" [1] and the idea is that "good enough" is actually a lot more flexible than some idealized perfection -- Linus Torvalds
Had the first versions of other imperfect specifications such as TCP/IP waited ten years for those in disagreement to work out their differences, the Web might still be hiding somewhere in the back of inventor Tim Berners-Lee's mind -- David Berlind

4 comments:

  1. The title is wrong, that should be:

    The GNU SmartEiffel Wrapper Libraries Collection.

    See the following message.
    Ok, it's a stab. I had to say something but didn't want to start a war on the SmartEiffel mailing list.

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  2. What I don't understand is why people are writing wrappers these days when we have EWG, which simply creates the perfect wrappers.

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  3. Berend, I don't think EWG supports SmartEiffel 2.x.

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  4. Another reason not to support SmartEiffel 2.x IMO.

    ReplyDelete