2011/5/6 David Reiss <dre...@fb.com>: > FWIW, you should not need lex or yacc to build the thrift compiler from > a release tarball, only to do development on it.
the point I was trying to make was that choosing C++ because of dependency X might have seemed like a natural choice, although it doesn't really make a difference when dependency X is not really universally available. also I think catering to the needs of Java, OSX and Windows developers turned out to be more important than one might have imagined. Java, because high profile open source projects in Java depended on Thrift, and thrift was a bit of a bump in the road for some of those projects. (Most notably Cassandra where people grew so desperate there was some talk of getting rid of Thrift). OSX because...well, if you attend programmer conferences a disproportionate number of developers now seem to use Macs. it has been that way for some years now. Windows, because it is the last of the oddball OSes and the developers that tend to use it tend to be the same people who can't figure out build problems without help from people who wouldn't touch Windows with a ten foot pole (in my experience). (the reason I named Python, despite wanting a Java compiler myself, was that Python is already installed more places that you can expect to find a working C++ compiler and it is easy to install where missing. and possibly less "offensive" than installing Java. besides, it would be likely that one would be able to embed a Python version on a Java VM anyway because of projects like Jython) -Bjørn
