On 19/11/2010 22:02, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday, November 19, 2010 13:53:12 Bruno Medeiros wrote:
On 19/11/2010 21:27, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
And by providing a lexer and a parser outside the standard library,
wouldn't it make it just as easy for those tools to be written? What's
the advantage of being in the standard library? I see only
disadvantages: to begin with it potentially increases the time that
Walter or other Phobos contributors may have to spend on it, even if
it's just reviewing patches or making sure the code works.
If nothing, else, it makes it easier to keep in line with dmd itself. Since the
dmd front end is LGPL, it's not possible to have a Boost port of it (like the
Phobos version will be) without Walter's consent. And I'd be surprised if he did
that for a third party library (though he seems to be pretty open on a lot of
that kind of stuff). Not to mention, Walter and the core developers are
_exactly_
the kind of people that you want working on a lexer or parser of the language
itself, because they're the ones who work on it.
- Jonathan M Davis
Eh? That license argument doesn't make sense: if the lexer and parser
were to be based on DMD itself, then putting it in the standard library
is equivalent (in licensing terms) to licensing the lexer and parser
parts of DMD in Boost. More correctly, what I mean by equivalent, is
that there no reason why Walter would allow one thing and not the
other... (because on both cases he would have to issue that license)
As for your second argument, yes, Walter and the core developers would
be the most qualified people to work in it, no question about it. But my
point is, I don't think Walter and Phobos core devs should be working on
it, because it takes time away from other things that are much more
important. Their time is precious.
I think our main point of disagreement is just how important a D lexer
and/or parser would be. I think it would be of very low interest,
definitely not a "major benefit to the D community".
For starters, regarding its use in IDEs: I think we are *ages* away from
the point were an IDE based on D only will be able to compete with IDEs
based in Eclipse/Visual-Studio/Xcode/etc.. I think much sooner we will
have a full D compiler written in D than a (competitive) D IDE written
in D. We barely have mature GUI libraries from what I understand.
(What may be more realistic is an IDE partially written in D, and
otherwise based on Eclipse/Visual-Studio/etc., but even so, I think it
would be hard to compete with other non-D IDEs)
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
