Mapping the Interface Description Language Type Model into C

The Interface Description Language (IDL) is a notation for describing the characteristics of data structures passed among collections of cooperating processes in a programming environment. In this paper we discuss a mapping from IDL to C data structures and macro definitions that supports the full language and is type safe and runtime efficient, but is not particularly compile-time efficient nor easy to use. We then propose that the mapping be performed in a new pre-processor, thereby achieving all five goals.