garbage collection status

Jeff Darcy jdarcy at redhat.com
Fri Feb 4 17:10:36 UTC 2011


On 02/03/2011 11:43 PM, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:57:20 +0100
> Jim Meyering <jim at meyering.net> wrote:
> 
>>> Jim, did you think about rewriting iwhd in Python? It's not that big.
>>
>> Or ruby.  Yes, definitely.  And Jeff before me.
>> The idea has been hovering in the background from day 1.
> 
> On second thought, maybe we're too deep in. Doing 50 lines per day
> puts the required time into the ballpark of 200 days. Almost a year
> with weekneds, basically. Yes, I discounted the generated files.
> But this also reminded me that we have YACC component, which would
> need to be interfaced to Python.


Actually Python has some pretty good parsing libraries of its own, and
Ruby's might be even better, so if we ever did use one of those
languages it would probably make more sense to use those facilities.
Also, bear in mind that iwhd as it exists today has taken less than a
year's effort including requirements/design, so doing it a second time
in a higher-level language should take a heck of a lot less time.

That said, I think the original point still stands.  If I could go back
in time I'd probably choose a different language/framework (probably
Python/Tornado), but at this point I don't think any of us want to be
tied down to such a project for as long as it would take.


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