Protocol Buffers Lite for Borland C++

[Dazza]

I have ported Protocol Buffers Lite to Codegear C++ 2007 (Borland C+
+). Note the *Lite*. This seems to be working fine at the moment. I
have an example project that serializes/deserializes the simple
"address book" message as per the "Protocol Buffer Basics: C++" page.

I have not ported the compiler code. I just use the protec.exe
included in the Windows binary distribution.

Anyone interested in this? I should be able to post to a public URL
soon.

[Kenton Varda]

Can you send a patch?  Assuming the changes are not intrusive I'd be happy to merge this back into the main distribution.  (Although I can't guarantee that it won't break again over time since we don't test on this platform.)

[Dazza]

Great. I think merging is definitely doable. The changes are fairly
minor and mostly guarded with #if defined(__BORLANDC__)

I had to move some of the Mutex:: methods in common.cc into an earlier
namespace section as the Borland compiler complained about having the
definition in a second namespace section. This change isn't
#ifdef'd. I would expect that this change can be made to the original
without upsetting the other compilers.

I also needed to produce a config.h file specifically for the Borland
compiler just as you have in the vsprojects directory for Microsoft VC+
+ in the standard distribution.

Lastly, I have an example Borland project file that has the correct
defines etc. to build Protocol Buffers Lite into a console application
along with an example of using addressbook.proto serialised/
deserialised to a string. One odd thing is that I have to "force c++
compile" as Borland expects c++ files to be .cpp not .cc. Of course
the files could be renamed by anyone not wanting to use that compiler
option.

I will post the source and project files to a public URL later today.

[Dazza]

It turns out that the namespace "internal" causes problems for the
Borland C++ compiler, specifically because of the internal method
declared in <ios>. This appears to be a bug in the compiler as these
names should not collide. In order to get protocol buffers lite to
compile I used the namespace "internals" rather than "internal". I
would expect that drastic a change is not something you would want to
merge into the main tree and is too intrusive to #ifdef.

[Kenton Varda]

Can you upload your patch to codereview.appspot.com regardless?  I'd like to see what changes are required, and other Borland users could reuse your patch.

[Dazza]

I have published this at:

http://www.codeshed.co.nz/protocolbuffers.php

To compare with the official implementation just rename .cpp files
to .cc. The C++ Builder compiler prefers c++ source files to have
a .cpp extension.

[Dazza]

Do you still need me to upload the zip file to
codereview.appspot.com? The link http://www.codeshed.co.nz/protocolbuffers.php
is permanent so maybe you could update the wiki so that fellow Borland/
Codegear/Embarcadero (whatever it is called these days) C++ Builder
users can discover this and give it a go?

We are successfully using this port to enable access from a java web
app to a legacy windows app that was built with C++ Builder. We are
using DCOM purely as a transport layer. Our COM interface has a
single method that accepts a Protocol Buffer containing all of our
request data and returns a Protocol Buffer with reply data. We are
using the J-Interop library to handle DCOM on the java side. The
combination of Protocol Buffers and J-Interop is working well. This
is fast both in performance and developer productivity, and is so much
easier than trying to work with COM directly.

[Kenton Varda]

It would be nicer to get the changes into the official release if possible, rather than have a fork which may become out-of-date.  But for that, I really need you to provide a patch, preferably against the latest SVN sources, rather than a zip file that doesn't even have matching file names.  I will need to review the changes line-by-line, and will probably suggest a number of changes -- this is where codereview.appspot.com comes in handy, as it allows me to send you comments attached to specific lines of code.

But if you don't have time for that, I suppose I could post the link.