Saving Metadata About Types: IDL Files
The need to preserve metadata about types has been known for a number of years, and a variety of component architectures already provide solutions to this problem. COM and CORBA, for example, allow developers to describe their components' interfaces in an IDL. IDL files serve as the public interface to the components they describe. The IDL syntax of both COM and CORBA is based on C/C++. The compilation of IDL files produces binary descriptions of the metadata described by the IDL files. In CORBA, this description is known as an interface repository; in COM, it is known as a type library.
A number of limitations arise with the use of IDL files.
IDL files remain separate from the source files of a type, which ...
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