[Lazarus] Parser

Adem listmember at letterboxes.org
Thu Jul 1 00:36:56 CEST 2010


  On 2010-07-01 00:30, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> It is a devilish dillemma.
It defintely is.

But, the whole process of evolution is just that [and, no, for this 
once, I am not out to start a 'creationism' vs 'evolution' war here ;) ]
> Being lax, and you become dumping ground for failed experiments of people that lose interest, and the main project will suffer. We already have a packages/ dir to prove this for the other libraries.
I think I fully understand Core's concerns: It simply does not make 
sense to destabilize the whole project after some adventure.

And, any code that gets into the main distribution should be such that 
it proves it is an essential part of it --i.e. it is worth having and 
worth maintaining.
> A fork for a while might be doable, and it wouldn't brake the new team with constant stability and compatibility requirements etc.
This is, IMHO, the best response one can expect. Implicit in this 
temporary fork should be the understanding that as long as the fork is 
considered better (I know, a subjective thing) and that it is backward 
compatible (or, with the absolute minimum --and/or understandable-- 
incompatibilities), the fork will be given due consideration for 
inclusion/acceptance in part or in full. IOW, forks should not end up 
being wild goose chases.
> Not wanting to plunge the project into a chaotic rewrite has nothing to do with commercial interests. If there are reasonable doubts about the success of this attempt, it is only logical that Core doesn't want to upset the project for a long time. And then there is the issue of possible speed degradation.
Asking for a rewrite of a running project would be insane --not that 
such insanity has never been in SW world (Netscape comes to mind)--, and 
we need to avoid that. A better solution would be a fork (or a parallel 
project).
> I think these "pie in the sky" kind of scenarios are several years if not longer beyond the initial C compiler. It will be a plant that needs a lot of nurturing and care for a very long term, before it becomes an alternative, and faces stiff competition. And there is another problem that the "pie in the sky" scenarios seem to be the main reasons for the compiler, so it will require quite a pigheaded team.
Of course, such stretched scenarios will take time --if they ever 
materialize. But, we can never know; perhaps there's already someone 
brilliant enough in the crowd here who's looking for some such feat pull 
and later use it as part of his/her CV.
> If these rosy C helps Pascal interoperability scenarios are possible at all. Kylix uses Pascal bindings to libc, despite Borland having a (compatible!) C/C++ compiler.  And C++ compatible Delphi code is stuffed top till bottom
> with {$externalsym xx} and similar helper commands
I am curious: Since compilers are your domain, allow me to ask: Do you 
think Borland did that (peppering code with '$externalsym xx ' stuff) 
because there was not other/better way? And, if you had a truly 
compatible C/C++ compiler, would you end up doing that too?

Cheers,

Adem





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