Hello, On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 14:42:05 +0000, Chris Wilson wrote: > I suspect that the programming language overhead pales into insignificance > compared to network latency and algorithm choice (including use of > databases and indexes). Major applications are written in interpreted > languages these days (Facebook, Hotmail, Basecamp, The Onion, Reddit), and > as you pointed out, Sendmail is at least partly interpreted too. > > The heavy data processing bits, like virus scanning, are often written in > C and would probably remain so; Spam Assassin is written in Perl and many > sites pipe their mail through it.
There's a reason why it has the nickname RAM Assassin... I'd rather not have my mailserver assassinate the other half of my available RAM. > I don't think a rewrite in e.g. Python would make thinks much worse, and > it would make them easy to improve. There are other mail servers written in Python and Lua already, so if you're serious, you could as well take a look at them instead of reinventing the wheel. For instance, there's Tethys: (I don't know where the site went, though) http://lists.luaforge.net/pipermail/luarocks-developers/2008-February/000341.html Also, Zed Shaw has written a mailserver in Python, which has been around for some time now, and seems to be stable: http://lamsonproject.org/ In fact, compared to a "real" programming language, exim's configuration file seems rather crude, so if I were to write an MTA in a scripting language, I'd do it because there would be advanced scripting capabilities, like using anonymous functions in the configuration file, the way I remeber both Tethys and Lamson to do it. Why do you want to retain backwards compatibility in a complete rewrite? This will be a hard task and it will be hard to guarantee that every last bit of legacy configuration files will be compatible with the new exim. In conclusion, I don't think a rewrite is worth the hassle (and shouldn't be called exim). Best regards, Moritz -- ## List details at https://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
