David Nadlinger wrote:
Hello Robert,
thank you for taking the time to read my proposal.
On 3/25/11 5:48 AM, Robert Jacques wrote:
First and foremost, I would strongly recommend against looking at
Thrifts internals; if you do, the project _should not_ be submitted to
Phobos. (Thrift is Apache License 2.0 which isn't compatible with the
Boost License). Alternatively, you could aim to get the library into
etc.*, or simply make it a D source project. I do feel that aiming for
Phobos would strengthen your application though.
This can certainly be discussed, but I don't think including this
project into Phobos would be the best choice – at least as long as an
external »interface compiler«, i.e. generator would be used –, but
rather trying to make it a part of the official Thrift project. This is
how Thrift support was done for other languages, and having the code
generator implementation in another project than the library it targets
seems not like a wise thing to do.
Although I'm not a lawyer, I have been involved with D long enough to be
aware of a large part of the issues which can originate from Phobos
being Boost-licensed. If we decide that we want to have Thrift support
in Phobos itself, it would, strictly speaking, become hairy with regards
to IP anyway, because at least as far as I can see, some protocol
details are in fact implementation-defined.
Figuring these protocol details out from the code is just what I meant
to do anyway, I'll clarify the draft with regard to this.
[…] But one of the major advantages of CTFE is that there is no
difference between regular D functions and CTFE D, so you can develop
a full Thrift IDL parser/code generator in D and then use it as part
of a build to today and an input to a string mixin tomorrow.I think
playing up D's strengths, and that you are coding with an eye to
the future, would strengthen your application.
To be honest, I don't think this will be possible with D CTFE in thee
near future until somebody steps forward and radically improves the
current CTFE implementation (thinking of it, this might be a nice
project for GSoC as well).
I'm giving CTFE a *major* overhaul right now. I don't know if I'll be
finished in time for the next compiler release, but definitely by the
release after that. Most importantly, bug 1330, which is the root cause
of almost all of the problems, will be fixed. I hope to move CTFE out
the "experimental feature" category.
