I have looked at YAML off and on over the years, and I'm not sure that it would be much of an improvement in this case.
I do believe that dropping the strict python syntax could make some things easier to read. I don't have a fully-baked proposal in mind, and I don't know what the perf hit would be. I will also note that -- like in many languages -- it's easy to write hard-to-read files. GYP has never had much of a style guide, and it probably could greatly benefit from one. It is important to make a fair apples-to-apples comparison for whatever we end up looking at. I suspect that given any tool or language, you can find some things that are easy to express and some that are harder. Even the existing chromium gyp files are not necessarily a model of clean code or good style. Also, one thing that's important to realize about GYP's syntax is that it is very set-based; the order things appear in the files is much less important than in many other languages (especially in how they handle conditionals, i.e., if/then/else). This has many advantages, but does also have some disadvantages. -- Dirk On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Eric Seidel <e...@webkit.org> wrote: > I'm curious if YAML was ever considered? I have very limited > experience with YAML, except for Google App Engine config files. > > It's very python parse-able? :) > > On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Mark Mentovai <m...@chromium.org> wrote: >> You’re not supposed to use arbitrary Python, it’s highly discouraged. We >> have a linter that keeps you from doing things you’re not supposed to do >> (like this), but it slows things down, so it’s not part of the “standard” >> GYP run that developers normally use. It can run as a pre-commit script or >> test on the bot or something else. Used as we’re using it, GYP basically is >> simple JSON, except the rules about commas are looser and # introduces >> comments. >> >> >> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:47 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rn...@webkit.org> wrote: >>> >>> On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:09 AM, Mark Mentovai <m...@chromium.org> wrote: >>>> >>>> The parser (and the grammar) works the way it does because it’s just >>>> Python >>> >>> >>> This works great for people who like Python syntax but not for someone >>> like myself who dislikes Python syntax. >>> >>> I also find it particularly annoying that people can use whatever Python >>> constructs they want to use in GYP. It dramatically reduces language >>> portability because you need to support quite a few Python constructs and >>> quirks in order to correctly parse GYP. >>> >>> I personally would have much preferred for it be a simple JSON file. >>> >>> - R. Niwa >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> webkit-dev mailing list >> webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org >> https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev >> > _______________________________________________ > webkit-dev mailing list > webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org > https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
