Re: Flood of commits from July?

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2024 at 09:24:34AM -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> 
> 
> On 10/6/24 11:18 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > Now imagine that half of DomTerm gets rewritten in Rust and then you
> > are scratching your head looking at a bunch of Rust code that you barely
> > understand when trying to fix problems in DomTerm.  That's the situation
> > you are promoting for Texinfo.
> 
> First, compared to C++ to Rust, moving from C to C++ is much more modest of 
> terms of
> code changes as well as new skills needed.
> 
> Right now DomTerm is a one-person project. However, suppose somebody cames to 
> me and says
> "I love the concepts of DomTerm but I think it would be better (for whatever 
> reasons)
> if it were implemented in Rust - and I volunteer to do the rewrite." If they 
> show
> they understand the architeture and philosophy of DomTerm, and have 
> demonstrated Rust
> proficiency, I would consider it. More likely if there was community and the 
> consensus
> of the community was that we should re-write to Rust. I would be willing to 
> help with
> and advise a Rust project, and gradually increase my Rust proficiency.
> 
> In the case of Texinfo and C++, it is quite different. We don't have anybody
> strongly arguing for C++ who is also willing to do the work. We also have a 
> primary
> maintainer who is strongly opposed to C++, and unwilling to work on C++ code.
> So unless those things change, Texinfo will stick with C and Perl. And that's 
> OK.

It's not even that I am unwilling to work on C++ anywhere, just in
Texinfo.  (I have worked on other C++ projects in the past.)  As I
have already stated the Texinfo project already has a lot of code in
it in various languages and using various libraries and systems, now
including a lot of C code using the Perl XS bindings, which code is
not very easy to understand, especially for a newcomer.  This gives it
a maintainability problem.  Adding C++ code makes this situation worse,
in my opinion.

The question for me is not, "is C++ a good language".  It is, "does
using C++ in Texinfo threaten the long-term future of the Texinfo project".
I can imagine a situation, hypothetically speaking, where a project gets
so large, so complicated, written using such a heterogeneous bunch of
languages and libraries, and with so few active contributors who understand
the system, that it receives no more updates, as the barrier for contributing
has become too high.  That is project death.

We have to admit that our time is limited and may become only more so
in the future. so should not write checks that we are unable to cash,
metaphorically speaking.