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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

KDE 3 was on DCOP, which would be fascinating to try to revive too. Unlike DBus where the programmer has to implement a DBus world, iirc every app was basically wired for automation from the start via DCOP, that it was just baked in. That would be fascinating to see.

I do really appreciate Klassik here though in general. There's so much nostalgia work for recreating or preserving various old systems. It's a noble tribute to see classic linux desktops also paid that honor.

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AFAIK, there was nothing in DCOP that automatically exposed functionality, and this old documentation seems to confirm it: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Architecture/DCOP

> Currently the only real way to receive data from DCOP is to multiply inherit from the normal class that you are inheriting (usually some sort of QWidget subclass or QObject) as well as the DCOPObject class.

I could be wrong but I believe the QWidget's that make up nearly every KDE app had DCOP built in to them.

It would have been possible to automatically wire up Qt slots from its signals and slots system because these are introspectable, but AFAIK that was not done. For any arguments that needed to be serialized as more than one element of a QDataStream, it would have required additional marshalling code. Objects would also have needed consistent and unique names.

It would have been hacky and questionable to incidentally expose application internals like that.

How it was apparently done was that eligible objects inherited DCOPObject, for which marshalling code was generated at build time using dcopidl2cpp.

https://api-staging.kde.org/legacy/3.0-api/classref/dcop/DCO...

Thanks for digging in further! I'd done some poking around but I appreciate the deeper look! This has always been a fascinating topic for me, but it was only a month or two ago I actually poked around, saw that same architecture page you'd linked, etc. Obviously you went further though & I appreciate it!

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