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Comment by Q6T46nT668w6i3m | Hacker News Reader

I love C++, so I'm excited.

I can imagine non-C++ libraries (e.g. Python or Ruby) wrapping the C++ interface rather than using a custom implementation.

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May I ask why? Plenty of implementations already exist for other languages, and since the interface is just HTTP, I see little benefit to wrapping the C++ library.

Official, full support, instead of a custom implementation where it can take weeks to add support for a new service that's already a part of the C++ lib. Also, there are some newer languages out there that don't have quality libraries for AWS, but do have C extension support. This will allow wrappers for to be created so these languages can be used with AWS as well. Just take a look at how the Java lib is used.

In my experience, it's just easier to take their API descriptor file (JSON IIRC) and generate a client from it.

This is what boto3 does

Wouldn't that be WADL?

No, WADL is XML. You can see some of the data files in the boto3 repository: https://github.com/boto/boto3/tree/develop/boto3/data

It is somewhat similar in concept

WADL is an description language for REST services.

Given that it is just an HTTP API, I'm not sure it would actually be that much faster to wrap a C++ API than just write a native lib. Plus unless the wrapper is written by Amazon as well, it's not really "official, full support."

I'm still not sure I follow. There are plenty of first-party fully supported SDK's for various languages, eg. Ruby, Node.js, Java, .NET, etc: https://aws.amazon.com/tools/

In fact from personal experience of the Node one the SDK uses the API descriptor to generate the client (Which makes unit testing it tricky incidentally, but I digress).

I cant. C++ is a pain to wrap.

Most good libraries written in C++ that are meant to be used as libraries in other languages expose a C interface. I don't see a C interface in their docs.

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