Re: Flood of commits from July?

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Oct 08, 2024 at 10:09:21AM -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> On 10/8/24 9:25 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Fair enough. I agree that large chunks of C *and* C++ *and* Perl is a bit 
> much.
> 
> I do note that at this point tp/Texinfo contains substantially more C code 
> than Perl,
> as judged by wc. If Patrice (or someone else) gets another burst of energy to 
> convert
> the rest of the Perl code to C, I think that would be great. But even better 
> if he
> felt free to use C++ constructs.

To be honest the situation you describe of a mixture of C++ and C (with no
Perl) would be probably be better than what we have at the moment, with
large amounts of code existing in both C and Perl versions.  I don't think
there's a practical way to get there in the foreseeable future, however.

I can imagine that at some point we will abandon the Perl version of
some code, requiring XS to use texi2any.  It could be possible at some
point after that that some other high-level language is substituted
for the remaining Perl code.  This is only a project for the future
though, for someone who is enthused to do the work, enthused for the new
implementation lanuguage, and willing to commit to maintenance thereafter.