Hi,
We are talking with various users of TAO to see if we can create a new modern IDL to C++ mapping. The idea is to drop all old compilers which lead to the current mapping and make a new IDL to C++ mapping that is using the latest draft C++0x standard.
We want to use full STL, shared_ptr, r-value, and everything else we could need. The idea is to prototype this first in TAO and than see if on the long term we can propose a new IDL to C++ V2 mapping to the OMG
This would be very welcome and something I've hoped would happen for a long time (I keep checking the OMG web site for efforts in this area, but keep being disappointed).
It is a huge undertaking to make a new mapping, but if there is enough interest we do see some options to start the work. It needs funding by some users but more importantly we need good ideas and feedback from the C++ community, let us not get another bad mapping
I'll be happy to help in whatever way I can (and as time allows). I've used ACE for many years and TAO for a couple of years on a couple of work projects, but my Corba knowledge is fairly limited (and I don't know any of the internals and protocol details, yet).
I would guess that a nice IDL to C++ mapping could be done with C++03 and TR1 , sprinkled in with some Boost libraries (that hopefully could / should be standardized, e.g. boost::any), and maybe a few C++0x features that really simplify things. Are there C++0x features that are "must haves"? (Lambdas, auto, decltype? I would think move semantics / r-value operations are mostly optimizations, but maybe I'm missing something major.)
Please share ideas of how things could look like, for example, what do we do for the _var/_ptr/_narrow, how would this look like with a new mapping. We can easily use std::string, std::vector, but especially _var/_ptr replacement is very important. Johnny