Re: [FreeWRL-develop] Codebase port to c++?

[Ian S. A. <ia...@ae...>]

On 16/04/13 11:11 AM, doug sanden wrote:
> 
>>
>> Hey all, so spidermonkey-17 is released, which is going to be the last
>> spidermonkey that has a C API; after this it's C++ only.
>>
>> Should we port freewrl to C++ or freeze our compatibility to
>> spidermonkey-1.5 through 17 ?
>>
> 
> What do you think Ian? Would you like to keep upgrading or would you
> prefer a freeze?
> -Doug
> The last time the freewrl C vs C++ issue came up, C won.
> I had done a test where I got freewrl to compile as C++. But then it was
> just C code that took longer to compile on my slow old machine, and had
> some awkward areas that would need a rewrite. We do have some C++
> at-the-margin: libs and plugins.
> I think there are ways to wrap a C++ library with a C interface, if
> necessary. But that could be more work for the main javascript
> maintainer - that's been you Ian - with unknown gain in functionality.
> My guess: freeze.
> 

Freeze is easier, since we don't have to port.  However, not keeping up
means we end up relying on dead code--or worse, embedding dead
code--which in general isn't very nice to do.

It's going to be a -long time- before the next spidermonkey is released
(next release is v24, which will be 2014 I think they said), but I
thought it'd be worthwhile to bring it up.

Also, migration to C++ may have other benefits -- for instance, it might
open us up to more contributors or more users of the API.  Going through
the whole codebase and converting our objects/structs/etc to classes
would probably allow us to simplify the code quite a bit too, at least
in theory....

I think if we were to do this change, this would put us into FreeWRL-3.