CBI: Component binary interface

preliminary draft: Thu Nov 11 09:00:40 PST 1999

Introduction

Goals

• provide high level interface
• integrate with current systems with a minimal of fuss
• allow development without any ties to any particular implementation
• provide fast/efficient interoperability between components created with arbitrary tools
• allow language support to be developed and maintained independantly of any particular implementation

Relationship to CORBA, DCOM and UNIX Shared Libraries.

Interface concepts

CBI is designed to be a very high level interface with strong semantics.

Types

• int

  Basic integral type. this should map to whatever type is the most useful to represent a general purpose number. It is signed where supported. The precision may vary from machine to machine but note that the specification only requires that at least 32 bits are preserved.

• token Basic opaque type.
• string
• byte A single octet (8 bits) of data. if no 8 bit type is availible this will be aliased to int.
• character
• bool

psuedo-grammar

alg_class ::= 
	"algebraic" "class" "$"UPPERCASE_ID "is" alg_class_decls "end"

alg_case_decls ::= alg_case_decl (";"? | ";" alg_case_decls)

alg_case_decl ::= "case" UPPERCASE_ID ("(" attr_list ")" | "" )

attr_list ::= 

References:

• The OMG Group: standards body that oversees CORBA
• Microsoft COM homepage: COM is microsofts Component object model. similar in scope to CBI. DCOM is an extension to COM to provide many of the features of CORBA
• Pizza: a language based on java which among other features, adds algebraic types
• App: a C++ preprocessor that adds Algebraic types to C++