I'd just point out that there are more differences between the language generators than it seems on the surface. We tried to have much more code reuse across the language generators than we ended up with, especially for C++/Java etc. which seem highly similar, but it turned out in practice to get really awkward really fast, so we erred on the side of more standalone language generators that are easier to understand in isolation.
I still think templates with more shared code for different generators is a good avenue to explore, but just want to raise a caution flag that it's been tried, and is reasonably difficult. -----Original Message----- From: Esteve Fernandez [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 3:04 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Some thoughts about changes to Thrift On Friday 06 March 2009 03:24:23 Mark Slee wrote: > That's pretty much my fault. Actually the current Thrift compiler served its puporse quite decently, but the coming of new languages and features has made it (along with the generators) a bit more complex and less easy to maintain. > I personally like Java and think it'd be a decent choice, but there do > seem to be a decent number of people out there building services who > seem to vehemently hate Java. Lots of *nix systems do not have a JVM > or JDK installed by default -- and it's pretty annoying for users who > aren't writing services in Java to have to install it to build the compiler. I'd argue for writing a parser in Java and use a template engine (Velocity, Freemarker, etc.). Why not Python? Dunno :-) I think Java is more widely deployed, it has better tools for scanning and parsing and more developers. Etch, another incubating project with similar goals to Thrift, uses JavaCC for parsing and Velocity as template engine for its compiler and generators, even though it also emits C# Using a template engine would make development of new features and the inclusion of more languages much easier. Instead of having to hack a generator to add some new feature, we could simply supply a new template file. For example, at some point in the future I'd like to build a generator for Javascript, and if we used a template engine, it would be a matter of writing a minimal generator and a bunch of templates. Cheers.
