Re: Subversion, decentralized version control, and the future.

"Ben Collins-Sussman" <sussman@red-bean.com> writes:
> On 6/28/07, Justin Erenkrantz <justin@erenkrantz.com> wrote:
>> One of the reasons that I view SVN as a
>> success is that we made it fairly simple for third-parties to
>> integrate with SVN - C is by far the best language for that.
>
> And yet, despite this fact, teams have gone off and reimplemented
> *everything* in Java and C#.

Yes, and how many third-party tools are built on top of those
implementations?

> Maybe this is inevitable. Maybe we should just define svn 2.0 as a
> specification with a test-suite to certify implementations. ;-)

No reason not to spec it out, but of course, users can't run a
specification -- we have to actually implement it too.

FWIW, I think C is fine. We've had our libraries (string, IO, etc)
developed for a while now. Full garbage collection would be nice, but
apr pools are pretty easy to work with. The advantages of Python or
Java or C# or insert-your-favorite-GC'd-high-level-language-here are
somewhat overstated. There is a slight development-time cost to using
C, but I think it's outweighed by the advantages Justin listed. Maybe
we should move to C++ (Daniel Berlin thinks so, IIRC).

(Of course, if anyone proposes rewriting in Lisp, I'm +1 :-) ).

-Karl

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Received on Fri Jun 29 20:07:00 2007