Why bother generating type information from an interface ?
With ORBit stable, language bindings had to load and parse the IDL definitions for the interface. This had several disadvantages. • Primarily performance – loading a load of IDL text, forking the pre-preocessor to pre-process it, resolving all the symbols as strings, converting to an internal representaton – took time. With a standard internal representation, and a simple dlopen to grab it we have a major performance win. • Include problems: many IDL files are grouped into a single file to build, and can cause grief when included individualy. This contrasts with a working bundle of interfaces, verified at package IDL compile time. • libIDL – is an unmaintained mess, and is not particularly pleasant to link against, or code to. • Finding the IDL files – there was no standard path structure, or method of reliably locating all the relevant IDL files. Now at least there is an ad-hoc shared standard.
