Concept

Since Smoke's goal is to help you write bind­ings for lan­guages oth­er than C++, it pro­vides a way to ac­cess Qt's API. The orig­i­nal thing about Smoke is that it does so by pro­vid­ing you with a small­er, more dy­nam­ic API that maps on­to Qt's.

You could write a Qt C++ pro­gram us­ing Smoke as the API in­stead of us­ing Qt's. In fac­t, you can see it here writ­ten by Ash­ley Win­ter­s.

I had to re­name it hel­lo.cpp to make it work be­cause that looks like C but may not re­al­ly be C ;-)

As you can see, the Smoke ver­sion is quite a bit more com­plex than the Qt one. But that's ok, re­mem­ber that the goal is a bind­ing, which means that what you need to make your life sim­pler is less API... which is what makes the pro­gram more ver­bose.

Let's ex­am­ine the Smoke hel­lo.cpp in de­tail.

One key point is call­Method:

// call obj->method(args)
void callMethod(Smoke *smoke, void *obj, Smoke::Index method, Smoke::Stack args) {
        Smoke::Method *m = smoke->methods + method;
        Smoke::ClassFn fn = smoke->classes[m->classId].classFn;
        fn(m->method, obj, args);
}

If you have pro­grammed in Python or Ru­by or a num­ber of oth­er dy­nam­ic lan­guages you may guess what this does al­ready.

It takes as ar­gu­ments a num­ber of things which still have to be ex­plained but the main gist is there is an ob­jec­t, there is a method, there are args, and it ends call­ing ob­j->method­(args).

The first ar­gu­ment is a Smoke point­er , which is the big ob­ject in the Smoke li­brary, cre­at­ed in our pro­gram by the init_smoke func­tion.

A Smoke ob­ject is a strange beast. It con­tains a de­scrip­tion (in this case, be­cause we got qt_smoke) for the whole Qt API.

You can find class­es in it in­dexed by their names, and meth­ods for each class in­dexed by their names and types of ar­gu­ments.

That is why you can have a gener­ic call­Method that will work for any kind of ob­ject and for any method in the class, be­cause all of them are some­where in the Smoke ob­jec­t.

The sec­ond ar­gu­ment is void *obj which is the ob­ject it­self we are ma­nip­u­lat­ing. So, if you are try­ing to call QLa­bel::set­Tex­t, it will have to be a Qla­bel* cast­ed as void*.

In the hel­lo.cpp ex­am­ple, we even cre­ate these ob­jects us­ing Smoke's API (see lat­er).

The third ar­gu­ment is a Smoke::In­dex which is what Smoke us­es to find the re­quest­ed method in its method ta­ble. This In­dex we get us­ing the get­Method func­tion, which is the sec­ond key piece of code:

// given class-name and mangled function-name, return an unambiguous method ID
Smoke::Index getMethod(Smoke *smoke, const char* c, const char* m) {
        Smoke::Index method = smoke->findMethod(c, m);
        Smoke::Index i = smoke->methodMaps[method].method;
        if(i <= 0) {
                // ambiguous method have i < 0; it's possible to resolve them, see the other bindings
                fprintf(stderr, "%s method %s::%s\n",
                i ? "Ambiguous" : "Unknown", c, m);
                exit(-1);
        }
        return i;
}

Here is an ex­am­ple of a get­Method cal­l, where we are get­ting QAp­pli­ca­tion::set­Main­Wid­get

Smoke::Index method = getMethod(smoke, "QApplication", "setMainWidget#");

As you can see, we search for the method us­ing strings of the class name and method name. Ex­capt for that pesky # at the end of set­Main­Wid­get#.

That is a ba­sic ar­gu­men­t-­type­-­man­gling scheme, since there can be more than one QAp­pli­ca­tion::set­Main­Wid­get on the Qt side of the fence, we are say­ing we want the one that has an ob­ject as the first and on­ly ar­gu­men­t. Here is the key to the man­gling tak­en from smoke.h:

* The munging works this way:
* $ is a plain scalar
* # is an object
* ? is a non-scalar (reference to array or hash, undef)
*
* e.g. QApplication(int &, char **) becomes QApplication$?

I am not yet com­plete­ly clear on how this is enough to do all the work (for ex­am­ple, what hap­pens if you have two meth­ods that take dif­fer­ent ob­jects as on­ly ar­gu­men­t?) but it's what I saw :-)

The last ar­gu­men­t, args is of Smoke::S­tack type, and it's the tricky one, at least for me.

Here's how it's used in the pre­vi­ous ex­am­ple, QAp­pli­ca­tion::set­Main­Wid­get

// qapp->setMainWidget(l)
Smoke::Index method = getMethod(smoke, "QApplication", "setMainWidget#");
Smoke::StackItem args[2];
smokeCast(smoke, method, args, 1, l, "QLabel");
smokeCastThis(smoke, method, args, qapp, "QApplication");
callMethod(smoke, args[0].s_class, method, args);

A Smoke::S­tack is a way to pass the ar­gu­ments to be used with the method get­Method gave us.

We first cre­ate an ar­ray of 2 Stack­Item­s:

Smoke::StackItem args[2];

Then we as­sign a val­ue to the sec­ond of them:

smokeCast(smoke, method, args, 1, l, "QLabel");

Here l is a point­er to a QLa­bel. ( Ok, it is re­al­ly de­clared as a void* be­cause, re­mem­ber, we are not us­ing the Qt API, so we have no clue what a QLa­bel is ;-) and what we are do­ing is stor­ing in args[1] a cast­ed ver­sion of l.

The ex­act de­tails of why you have to pass smoke and method are not that im­por­tan­t, and they seem pret­ty in­volved, so I won't try to go there, at least not yet. This has to be done for each ar­gu­ment for the method.

Then we have a sim­i­lar, yet dif­fer­ent line:

smokeCastThis(smoke, method, args, qapp, "QApplication");

This puts the qapp void * in args[0], cast­ed to QAp­pli­ca­tion. There are tricky C++ rea­sons why this is done slight­ly dif­fer­ent here than on smoke­Cast, which I am not 100% sure I get right, so I will keep qui­et ;-)

This spe­cial case is on­ly for the ob­ject to which the method be­longs (the this ob­jec­t).

Here is the code for smoke­Cast and smoke­Cast­This

// cast argument pointer to the correct type for the specified method argument
// args[i].s_class = (void*)(typeof(args[i]))(className*)obj
void smokeCast(Smoke *smoke, Smoke::Index method, Smoke::Stack args, Smoke::Index i, void *obj, const char *className) {
        // cast obj from className to the desired type of args[i]
        Smoke::Index arg = smoke->argumentList[
                smoke->methods[method].args + i - 1
        ];
        // cast(obj, from_type, to_type)
        args[i].s_class = smoke->cast(obj, smoke->idClass(className), smoke->types[arg].classId);
}

// cast obj to the required type of this, which, dur to multiple-inheritance, could change the pointer-address
// from the one returned by new. Puts the pointer in args[0].s_class, even though smoke doesn't do it that way
void smokeCastThis(Smoke *smoke, Smoke::Index method, Smoke::Stack args, void *obj, const char *className) {
        args[0].s_class = smoke->cast(obj, smoke->idClass(className), smoke->methods[method].classId);
}

But where did we get l or qap­p? You can use these same mech­a­nisms to cre­ate an ob­jec­t:

void *qapp;
{
    // new QApplication(argc, argv)
    Smoke::Index method = getMethod(smoke, "QApplication", "QApplication$?");
    Smoke::StackItem args[3];
    args[1].s_voidp = (void*)&argc;
    args[2].s_voidp = (void*)argv;
    callMethod(smoke, 0, method, args);

    qapp = args[0].s_class;
}

You get QAp­pli­ca­tion::QAp­pli­ca­tion(s­calar,un­de­f) which should hope­ful­ly map to QAp­pli­ca­tion::QAp­pli­ca­tion(argc,argv). You cre­ate a Smoke::S­tack of 3 item­s. The first is un­set be­cause this is a con­struc­tor, so it has no this yet, and the oth­er two are argc and argv.

Then you call it through call­Method, and you get the re­sult­ing ob­ject via args[0].s_­class.

Lat­er you re­peat this sort of op­er­a­tion for ev­ery method call you wan­t, and you got your­self an ap­pli­ca­tion.

The binding side of things

So, how do you use this to bind your lan­guage to Qt?

Well, you will have to cre­ate an ob­ject in your lan­guage called, for ex­am­ple, QAp­pli­ca­tion, and map the "miss­ing method" mech­a­nism (y­our script­ing lan­guage prob­a­bly has one) which is used when a method is un­de­fined so that some­how it finds the right Smoke method (man­gling the name cor­rect­ly should be the hard part), then cre­ate the Smoke::S­tack with the passed ar­gu­ments, cal­l, get the re­sult, wrap it in some lan­guage con­struct you can use of the side of your lan­guage, and pass it back.

It looks in­volved, and I am sure it's trick­y, but at least it on­ly has to be done once un­like on tra­di­tion­al bind­ings, where you had to do it for ev­ery class and for ev­ery method.

The tra­di­tion­al so­lu­tion was to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate the code for such wrap­ping (like SWIG does). I think Smoke is less er­ror prone.

If I keep on un­der­stand­ing things, there may be a sec­ond part of this ar­ti­cle, ex­plain­ing the Smoke­Bind­ing class, and per­haps a short ex­am­ple of how to bind Qt in­to a lan­guage (Io is a strong can­di­date).

The reg­u­lar­i­ty of Io's syn­tax is prob­a­bly go­ing to make the bind­ing sim­pler than most.