[rdnzl-devel] Re: in-process DLLs

[Edi Weitz]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:20:01 -0400, "Brian Connoy" <BConnoy at morrisonhershfield.com> wrote:

> (Apologies if I did not submit this reply correctly)

Nope, that was fine.

> I'm a certified neophyte where it comes to RDNZL and .NET generally,
> but to learn one "can't directly create new .NET classes from within
> RDNZL" kinda blows my hopes out of the water (I think).

Well, it depends on what you want to do.  RDNZL is technically a Lisp
shim above (unmanaged) C++ code which can call into (managed) .NET
code.  If you look at the documentation, you will see that you can do
about everything you'll want with /existing/ classes - create new
objects, access their fields and properties, call their methods, you
name it.

You could, using these tools, create /new/ classes at /runtime/ the
same way you could do it in, say, C# (search Google), but obviously
the result is not the same as a class defined at compile time by C#
source code.  To achieve this, you'd need to have (the RDNZL
equivalent of) a DEFCLASS form which compiles to IL.  This is not
impossible, but it's probably a good amount of work and nobody has
done it yet.  Patches welcome, of course... :)

Edi.