From: Bernard D. <bde...@or...> - 2011-06-29 12:28:53
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Hi Aaron, nice to hear from you. Le 27 juin 11 à 17:57, Eeyore a écrit : > Before I was whisked away into the great oblivion that is my current > job about a decade ago, I did a little coding in the AlphaX core, > here are my thoughts on the move: > > Moving to Objective-C/Cocoa for the UI is probably the only way > forward, so this is generally a good move. See below for my thoughts > on the moving the core to Objective-C. > > I believe Pete's concern about open sourcing the code was that he > didn't want *his* code to be out in the wild. I don't think he would > take great objection to a complete rewrite making it into the wild. > It is unclear about his opinions about a hybrid code-base or how he > would feel about naming it Alpha, but I'm sure someone can ask him. I agree, this is why the current code is not concerned here by the open sourcing proposal. An entirely new code base must be started in Cocoa. > Personally, I would be more inclined to abandon the current code > base and start relatively fresh. I haven't looked at the Alpha code > in a few years, but a lot of what it struggled to do is part of the > Cocoa API (I'm thinking of a lot of the file system interface code > that I recoded when we moved it to Carbon and the text engine code > that I was trying to rewrite using ASTUI). Keep in mind that Pete > was trying to implement customized behaviors on Macintosh System 7 > (6?) that are now considered standard behaviors (or out of date > behaviors) on OS X. A new start would probably allow us to reduce > the total code and maybe get a more modern UI experience. That's right. The first parts I've started to code lead indeed to an amazing reduction of the code compared to what it would be in Carbon. > There are also maintenance issues with the current code base. > Starting with a smaller, cleaner, more-modular, more-testable > skeleton might be easier to maintain (especially if it is going to > be open source) than trying to continue to graft new pieces onto the > old skeleton which was (and may still be) highly intertwined. Object oriented programming indeed forces to adopt a clean modular way of doing things. The MVC model makes this even cleaner. cheers, Bernard |