On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Maarten Lankhorst m.b.lankhorst@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Jim,
2008/3/27, Jim Chen jim@darchons.net:
Hi everyone,
I have this idea of implementing vbscript.dll for Google SoC. Any comment would be appreciated before I start working on my proposal.
The reason for implementing vbscript.dll is because right now there's nothing in the trunk about it. jscript.dll has a stub, but vbscript.dll doesn't, and it's an area that I think I can work on. VBScript is used by the Windows Installer, can be potentially be used for DirectMusic script (from http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-ToDo), and some applications use it.
Just the core language/runtime (vbscript.dll) is implemented, no extra COM/OLE objects such as FSO (file system object), etc. (unless I have time). The language by itself is designed to be simple and easy, so an interpreter shouldn't be hard. I wrote a C-style script interpreter in Java this past year. For a few years I used to hack VB, and I know the language and VBScript is just a cousin of VB. The runtime library is not big, and writing it shouldn't take too much time either.
I think the hardest part would be to implement the COM interfaces that deal with scripting. And that's the area I know least about.
I don't know if you could do all of it in 3 months, what if it takes longer, would you still be interested in continuing work on it? COM isn't that hard, if you run into troubles with it a lot of wine developers know about it, and there are a lot of good com examples in the wine code.
Cheers, Maarten.
Of course, if I end up doing it I will finish it till it's done. Isn't that one of GSoC's purposes, to stay involved even after the program ends? But obviously I still need to accomplish things during the program so that's why I'm still doing research on it, to see how much time I might need to get at least something done. I'm OK with the basic COM stuff. IUnknown doesn't scar e me :) But for more advanced stuff, I'm sure I'll need to ask around.
Thanks! Jim