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Re: choice of implementation language


From: Simon Josefsson
Subject: Re: choice of implementation language
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:20:36 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.110011 (No Gnus v0.11) Emacs/22.2 (gnu/linux)

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> So I conclude that the choices are
>
>   Perl
>   Python
>   Ruby
>
> If using Perl, we could easily restrict ourselves to
> features of 5.8 or even older.  With Python and especially Ruby,
> I'd advocate requiring much more recent versions, due to their relative
> immaturity.

My preference would be perl, but only because the other alternatives
appears to have more serious problems: any typically non-interpreted
language (i.e., C/C++/Java) is difficult to run on many platforms
without additional tools.  I've had significant problems deploying two
different Ruby applications on the same system (both Ruby applications
wanted to modify system Ruby files which is unacceptable).  Python may
be a good candidate, but given that automake already requires Perl, the
pains with perl doesn't outweigh the disadvantage with another
pre-dependency, and personally my perl knowledge is better than my
python knowledge.

I've had problems with forward compatibility of perl between versions,
and in libidn I've given up on making the perl script work with all perl
releases so I have run the perl script once and then stored the
generated files in Git.  However, problems like that can be debugged and
fixed, so I don't think it is a complete show-stopper.

/Simon




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