Benefits to Customers

Babel has two types of customers: developer and user. The developer implements a library that will be used by one or more users. Since one goal of the developer is to increase their customer base, the developer writes a SIDL file that effectively publishes the interface to their software in a platform and language neutral manner. The user, on the other hand, may not care or even know that they are interacting with a library through Babel.

Babel provides some features that benefits user and developer alike. The most important aspect to note here is that all Babel objects are reference counted. This feature is critical to encapsulate the memory allocation library (e.g. C's malloc/free or C++'s new/delete) used in the implementation of the object. Users never need concern themselves with when to free up a resource, they only declare when they're done with their reference to that resource. Developers are free to use different memory allocation subsystems in different parts of their code if need be.



babel-0.10.2
users_guide Last Modified 2005-03-23

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