On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 09:44:20PM +0400, Yaroslav Rastrigin wrote: > Rep. Ok, I'm not claiming WM _is_ rewritten, but I know from experience - > if you could quickly prototype something in scripting language, it will very > likely stay so, instead of properly coded. Eventually, over time software > manages to migrate from nice C code with occassional interpreter calls to > one large table of callbacks exported to interpretable code and called from > there. Then, you start optimising scripted code for speed, implement > precompiling, next is crucial parts of C code are being implemened as a > library to chosen language, and suddenly you have fully featured fully > scripted system.
There are quite a few things I could've implemented in Lua with much less work (e.g. the rewritten splitting code) but haven't because the code is an essential part of the WM that users have no need to configure. However, Ion is indeed quite fully scripted system. But the point is to provide users a way to write extensions so I don't have to bloat the C code with every single feature one can conceive of. I think providing a proper scripting environment is the better thing to do. I don't know how many and how mature free software projects you've had but the requests just pour in... If you implement them all the C code eventually becomes bloated crap and if you do not, there's no end to the requests. PS. I tried to statically compile a version of latest Ion for the laptop just to try it out but apparently libc on my primary computer doesn't want to be run under the 2.0 kernel. I also didn't even have kernel headers installed to actually compile anything. -- Tuomo
