[ros-general] Interest in ReactOS

[Mark Grosberg]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Andrew "Silver Blade" Greenwood wrote:

> So an MP3 file would be an object of type mp3file, which would be a subclass
> of audiofile, subclass of file, etc.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and its the kind of thing OS/2's Workplace
Shell tried to bolt on using SOM. It was also part of Apple's Pink project
(somewhere I still have a Taligent programming manual).

> But in any case, I feel an object-oriented API would be nicer. This is
> however difficult as callbacks for C++ objects are a pain (you can't seem to

Probably a language-neutral API and then writing a C++ wrapper for the API
is the best way to go.

> pass a pointer to a member function to anything) without doing some sort of
> bodged workaround (usually involving lots of little macros...) You could, of
> course, have standard OnPaint() OnKeyDown() etc routines, or even have an
> event object which gets passed around. But this still has difficulties.

The event object is a good paradigm -- it makes distributed computing
easier if a message in transit can also receive messages to its self (same
with class objects).

Such a discussion is probably outside the scope of the reactos project
though. They are providing a kernel that supports a particular API. An OO
subsystem could probably be built running on a Microsoft Windows box and
then ported over to ReactOS with almost minimal effort.

But that kind of stuff seems more like the realm of the application... my
particular area of interest is embedded where filesystems are rare.

L8r,
Mark G.