On 10/21/06, Branko Èibej <brane@xbc.nu> wrote:
> Garrett Rooney wrote:
> > Sure, that's certainly an issue we'd have to worry about. In this
> > proposal there would continue to be large chunks of code written in C,
> > the low level libraries especially, but perhaps even big things like
> > mod_dav_svn.
>
> So, now I'm really interested ... just /why/ would mod_dav_svn have to
> be written in C?
Well, at least the core apache module itself would be C. Sure, it
could call into Lua or any other language that had an appropriate C
interface, so if we provided that sort of thing for a portion of the
system written in Lua it could certainly be used from mod_dav_svn just
like any other program.
> Another note about C++ vs. any other higher-level language: I bet I can
> fix current trunk so that it compiles (and works) with C++ within a
> week. Three weeks, if you want to avoid using casts wherever we pass
> around void* batons. From that point onwards, it's all just incremental
> changes.
>
> I challenge anyone to do the same with Lua or Python or anything else.
No argument there, the difference between C and C++ is certainly
smaller than the difference between C and Lua or Python or any other
scripting language for that matter. One one hand that means it's
easier to retrofit to our current code. On the other it means that
you're still writing in something rather low level, with all the
problems that entails.
> > Using multiple languages would introduce some problems,
> > there is no doubt, but I'm not convinced that they are insurmountable.
>
> Of course they're not, after all, half of our contrib is in Python or
> Perl today.
>
> On the other hand ... mixing C and C++ is probably much easier than
> mixing C and Lua. Or maybe not ... the differences are subtle enough
> that they still catch me unawares from time to time.
>
> Not that I care, I'm perfectly comfortable mixing SmallTalk and PDP-10
> assembly, or even Visual Basic, but I suppose something like that would
> be too much of a good thing for this project. :)
Heh.
-garrett
Received on Sat Oct 21 23:07:32 2006