On Thursday, 8 March 2012 at 04:56:07 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
If you took it from ddmd, then it's definitely going to have to
be GPL.
Now, there is interest in having a D parser and lexer in
Phobos. I don't know
if your version will fit the bill (e.g. it must have a
range-based API), but we
need one at some point. The original idea was to more or less
directly port
dmd's lexer and parser with some adjustments to the API as
necessary
(primarily to make it range-based). But no one has had the time
to complete
such a project yet (I originally volunteered to do it, but I
just haven't had
the time).
When that project was proposed, Walter agreed to let that port
be Boost rather
than GPL (since he holds the copyright and the port would be
going in Phobos,
which uses boost).
The problem with what you have (even if the API and
implementation were
perfect) is that it comes from ddmd, which had other
contributors working on
it. So, you would have to get permission from not only Walter
but all of the
relevant ddmd contributors. If you were able to _that_, and it
could get
passed the review process, then what you've done could be put
into Phobos. But
that requires that you take the time and effort to take care of
getting the
appropriate permissions, making sure that the API and
implementation are
acceptable for Phobos, and putting it through the Phobos review
process. It
would be great if you could do that though.
- Jonathan M Davis
This is great news. I was really worried that the license was
etched in stone. I'll need help finding out who owns the code,
plus legal advice if the process is more than just getting a
simple confirmation email from each of the original authors.
I have some comments I feel are very interesting regarding the
lexer and pointers. There are no pointers in any of the code
besides the lexer, so I think that will be very satisfying to
you. Now I don't know everything about ranges, but if you simply
mean dynamic arrays, then yes, everything except the lexer uses
arrays when necessary, although there's simply a lot of code
which doesn't need them because most of the objects are really
just lists of members, many of which are not arrays.
About the lexer, one thing I realized about the Wild-West pointer
style as I was porting it is that it must be blazing fast. To my
understanding, to call p.popFront() requires two operations, ++p;
followed by --p.length; plus possibly array bounds checking, I
don't know.
++p is all that the current lexer needs. It used to only check
for EOF at each junction, but since I'm parsing little chunks of
code instead of whole files now, it checks "if ( p >= endBuf )"
at the beginning of each token scan, which gets pretty close to
not going out of bounds, since most tokens aren't very long. That
lexer is a tribute to very fast programming of an old school
which will go away if it changes. Still, I can sense a tidal wave
of RANGES coming, and I fear I'll just have to bid the little
thing goodbye! :-(
