Interops?

[Douglas_Handy]

@385723:@Emile Schwarz

Hal: next time, simply put links to the report.

There is a new Xojo blog entry which states this (in part):

Interops make it much easier to call into the system when something you need isn’t provided by the Xojo framework. We are making great progress on Interops for Android which is likely the first platform upon which they will be supported. In fact, the Android framework is being built in Xojo using Interops. We’ve been working very hard for some time now to provide support for Android. There’s a lot to talk about and Travis will be covering it in detail in his session later today and we’ll post more on our blog as we reach milestones.*

[Emile_Schwarz]

So Interops is a Xojo thing ?

[Louis_D]

no. interops is short for interoperability (structures, objects, etc.)

Here is an example that has nothing to do with Xojo.

[Sam_Rowlands]

Hopefully they’ll work with Swift frameworks as Apple’s next move is to phase out Objective-C

[Michel_Bujardet]

Apple has never been dull. After forcing Obj-C as the only language for years, there are going to phase it out ?

I still remember when Pascal and later Hypercard were “THE” language for Mac

[Julen_I]

@385590:@Bob Keeney

Linux and Windows definitely not at first and maybe not at all.

I am concerned by this statement, although I have to admit my level of knowledge is way below what is needed to assess the implications and consequences here. Anyone care to comment on that?

Thanks in advance.

Julen

[Christian_Schmitz]

For Java (Android), you can simply query via introspection all the APIs.
For Mac/iOS you can easily parse the source code and/or use introspection on the cocoa classes.
For Windows or Linux, this is much more difficult.

[Julen_I]

Thanks Chirstian. I got that part (sorry, maybe I was not clear), what concerns me is what will happen in the future (in terms of of performance, understanding performance in a broad sense) with the platforms that can’t use interops. Will they (somehow) be left behind?

[Massimo_Valle]

@385803:@Julen Ibarretxe Uriguen

Thanks Chirstian. I got that part (sorry, maybe I was not clear), what concerns me is what will happen in the future (in terms of of performance, understanding performance in a broad sense) with the platforms that can’t use interops. Will they (somehow) be left behind?

You can still use traditional declares.

[Javier_Menéndez]

As I understood from the XDC, the use of interops has nothing to do with performance, but with easyness in order to access the underlaying APIs from the targeted OS. If there is not Interops availables for a particular OS, then we still can use Declares for that… but in that case we have to deal with types conversion et al, while with Interops this is done transparently.

[Michel_Bujardet]

One thing is for sure. Without declares, Xojo iOS is not much more than a botched toy.

Hopefully with interops, Android will be on par with Desktop. And other, much more implanted languages.