[Kde-bindings] Some refactoring

[Arno Rehn]

Am Montag, 15. Januar 2007 11:29 schrieb Richard Dale:
> On Sunday 14 January 2007 14:04, Arno Rehn wrote:
> > Am Samstag, 13. Januar 2007 12:25 schrieb Paolo Capriotti:
> > > Hi,
> > > I've found some time to come back to Qyoto hacking, and I've decided to
> > > port most of the code that was using ArrayList's, Hashtable's and other
> > > .NET 1.1 idioms to .NET 2.
> >
> > Great! That was what I wanted to do today. ;)
> >
> > > This should bring an improvement both in terms of code readability and
> > > performance.
> > > Not all legacy containers have disappeared, though, because I still
> > > have to figure out what those methods like
> > > AddAddObjectObjectToHashtable do :)
> >
> > The Add* methods in C++ create a Callback, which we can use to call C#
> > Methods from C++. It works like this: You first create a delegate in C#
> > and a typedef in C++; both with the same signature (IntPtr in C# becomes
> > void* in C++, look at qyoto.h). Then you have the Add* methods in C++,
> > which take a method pointer (or a delegate in C#) as an argument and set
> > the pointer/delegate to a method pointer with the type of the equivalent
> > typedef. Now you can call a C# method with (*whatever)() from C++.
> > AddObjectObjectToHashtable takes the pointer to a C# Hashtable and the
> > pointers of two C# objects as arguments. In C# the pointer to the
> > Hashtable is used to get the real Hashtable, same goes for the two
> > objects. Then the objects (one key, one value) are added to the Hastable.
>
> I see how it works. Setting up a delegate to call back from C/C++ takes
> quite a lot of effort and we need to have a consistent naming scheme like
> we have now. But a bit less confusing, as 'AddAddObjectObjectToHashtable '
> is a bit of a mouthful. Are we using 'Add' for both 'add an item to a hash
> table', and for 'setup a delegate to do something'? Maybe 'Install' would
> be a better word for setting up a delegate - eg
> 'InstallAddObjectObjectToHashtable'. And 'ObjectObject' seems a bit
> redundant, could that be shortened to just 'Object', so we have
> 'InstallAddObjectToHashtable'?
The thing with "Install" instead of "Add" is a good idea, it was quite 
confusing for me, too. But I prefer to have "ObjectObject" in the name, 
because I took always all the arguments of a method for a marshaller. 
Sometimes there are things like "AddIntObject" and I think it's even more 
confusing if you have a "AddIntObjectToHashtable" and 
a "AddObjectToHashtable".

> I was wondering if it would be a good idea to move marshalling code out of
> SmokeInvocation.cs to SmokeMarshallers.cs or similar, to make the code
> clearer.
Good idea.

-- 
Arno Rehn
arno at arnorehn.de