Announcing Magpie, an L4 interface generator

[Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale]

Hi everyone,

I'm pleased to announce the first public release of the Magpie interface 
generator.

Magpie was written at the University of NSW over the course of the last 
six months to support several operating system projects. It was inspired 
by, and owes a large debt to, the de facto interface generator for L4, 
IDL4. Magpie's advantages over IDL4, are in its use of templates for 
output, allowing rapid changes to output modes and easy sharing of 
output code, and its support for the ARM architecture. On the flip side, 
Magpie does not currently support DCE IDL, long IPC, or optimised stub 
support for the ia32 architecture.

New output modes, such as component orientation and C++ support, are in 
development and planned for a future release.

Magpie is currently experimental software, under active development. If 
you use it, I would be very interested to hear any reports, both 
positive and negative. Bug reports are, of course, particularly appreciated.

Magpie can be downloaded from here:

http://www.disy.cse.unsw.edu.au/Software/Magpie/

Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale
DiSy group, UNSW