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Bound by Smoke I

This is what I un­der­stood of Smoke so far. I may be way of­f, since it is C++ sor­cery of a high­er lev­el than I'm used to, but I re­al­ly think I am get­ting the hang of it (and a bunch of thanks to Richard Dale and Ash­ley Win­ters who are the ones that made me un­der­stand so far. Any mis­takes a re my fault, any good thing is theirs ;-).

This piece is on­ly half of the sto­ry, though. Maybe one third.

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.

Ashley Winters / 2006-04-04 04:51:

That's a cool writeup. I just wanted to go a bit further in depth on how the casting works.



When you pass the className to smokeCast, you're actually passing the "current" class of the object, not the class you want it casted to. Your language binding has to remember the Qt type of each object it creates. In my example program, I just hard-coded the classes.



The smokeCast() function casts an object pointer from the class you say it is to the class of the argument (or this) it belongs in. That's why you have to pass the current method and arg# to the smokeCast() function -- it's introspecting the type of that method's argument (the 'arg' variable) and calling Smoke's dynamic caster with the from_type being what *you* passed in, and the to_type being the type Smoke knows the argument is supposed to be.



Neat, eh?

phone number lookup / 2011-12-03 22:42:

this is really interesting viewpoint on the subject i might add

employment background check / 2011-12-27 23:32:


Well, the write-up is truly the freshest on this laudable topic. 


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