MIDLC: The MIDL Compatible IDL Compiler

[tridge at samba.org]

Mike,

 > Actually I don't think WIDL generates any NDR routines. It just generates
 > the "glue" necessary to build against MS's libraries. The mashalling
 > functions that actually encode and decode NDR is the hard part so WIDL
 > doesn't help us much.

When WIDL is complete I suspect it will do what MIDL does, which is to
generate inline NDR encoding for most things, but punt to the library
calls for more complex structures.

Either way, Mike is right that WIDL isn't any use for Samba. We are
not at all interested in object level compatibility with windows RPC
like wine is, and we certainly don't want to be held back by the
limitations of the APIs that Microsoft inherited from Apollo. Many of
the neat things we do with Samba4 rpc would not be possible if we
followed the MIDL way of doing things.

It all comes down to Samba caring about wire compatibility, not local
API compatibility.

Cheers, Tridge