RB - What's the way you follow to write the KDE
bindings? Do you have to manually write everything?
RD - I wrote a utility called 'kalyptus' by adapting the kdoc
documentation tool so that it generates apis, rather than
documenting them. It accepts C++ headers directly, there is no need
to massage the intput first into a suitable format. As the parser
reads and parses all the headers into an abstract syntax tree
before generating any output, there is full access to the class
hierarchy, and any inherited methods. For instance, it is possible
to count methods with the same name, or to determine whether a
class inherits a particular method. The bindings generator can make
multiple passes through the methods in a class, unlike say SWIG,
which works on a one pass/one file at a time basis.
RB - For how many classes do you have
bindings?
RD - About 300 Qt classes/7000 methods, and 500 KDE classes/8000
methods for each of the three languages.
RB - What when a new release appears, like
KDE3?
RD - The bindings are regenerated for each KDE release. I take a
patch of the manual edits that were needed for the previous
release. Then run the new headers through kalyptus, and apply the
patch of manual edits. Recently, it took about a week and a half to
regenerate the bindings for C/Objective-C/Java, after about two
months worth of KDE C++ header changes from the previous
release."
