dce/rpc "client" api

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, Andrew Tridgell wrote:

> > believe me when i say that having an IDL compiler would have made the task
> > only marginally easier.
> 
> no, I'm afraid I don't believe that. A very large part of our problems
> was cause directly by the hand generated nature of that code. The code
> was extremely fragile with subtle dependencies on alignments, sizes of
> structures etc. An IDL compiler would have allowed us to concentrate
> on the high level description of the structures rather than having to
> mentallly assemble the ndr wire format for each function.

yeah, but you don't know what those structures _are_ :) :)

the issues that hit you with sizes of structures and alignments are
*exactly* the same, regardless of whether you hand-generate the code or
use an IDL compiler.