Re: [Libbt-devel] News on the Mac front - LibBT 1.03

[Peter S. <stu...@cd...>]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 03:27:29PM -0700, Dakidd wrote:
> >Wow, long mail. :)
> 
> Heck, for me, that's just barely a baby email :)

Wordy messages can be nice, but take so long to type..


> >> Next step:
> >> Hacking the bejeezus out of the stuff that tries to talk to the
> >> 'net. CURL - FLUSH! Gonna use Apple URLAccess instead.
> >
> >Why? Doesn't curl do OpenTransport? If not, are they interested in
> >having support for it? That's where it belongs anyway.
> 
> If it DOES do OT, I haven't heard about it. But to be honest, I
> haven't been listening for such news.

Doesn't look like it. Try asking around the curl community to see if
there's interest for supporting OT. If not a neat trick would be a .c
file that uses URLAccess and provides curl-compatible functions that
libbt can use, and only compile and link with it on OS 9.


> In an earlier iteration of "Figure out what works and what needs to be
> built as a substitute for Macs", I had operational UrlAccess code for
> talking to the tracker.

Ah. How does the interface compare to curl or even sockets?


> >I think Python is a really nice language and if you ever feel like
> >learning a new scripting language I recommend it wholeheartedly.
> 
> I've always been uncomfortable - "lost", might be the best way to
> put it - in object-oriented languages. For me, a purely procedural
> language like plain old C is a better fit for the way my mind
> works.

I'm not much of an OO fan either, but I think Python does OO very
well in that it isn't actually required, you can have a completely
flat namespace. I have yet to make my first class and object in
Python.

If you feel like it, take a quick look at that book URL I mentioned.
:)


> I've gotta agree completely with that... Python may be godlike in
> certain ways,

It's incredibly readable, it has a very good set of extensions and
many connections to useful libraries, it has pretty smart handling of
data - many nice tricks you can do that you wish you came up with
yourself, and much more. :) It's fantastic for rapid prototyping.
It's great for making portable GUIs quickly. You can even compile to
standalone binaries on some platforms. (Bytecode+interpreter DLL..)


> but for compute and IO intensive software like what we've got with
> BT, it's way in the dust behind something like C or even pascal.

Anything compiled to machine code is good.


> >> the interpreter has its own bugs and glitches
> >
> >Is that MacPython-OS9?
> 
> Yeah...

Ouch. :(


> Sentiment amongst the Python folk I've talked to is basically "You
> should be running MacOS X - That's where all the Python support
> work is nowdays. Get with the times." To which my reply is a
> standard "If you're buying me the hardware to run X on, I'll start
> running X. Until then, shuddup yer face about getting with the
> times."

Save up and get a Mac Mini. It looks like a nice little box. :)


> If it weren't for wanting to run BitTorrent, I wouldn't have Python
> on my system at all. (And if/when I get a "real" client coded,
> believe that I'll reclaim the disk space wasted on Python and the
> official BT implementation quicker than you can say "Are you sure
> you want to empty the trash?")

Hehe. You can never have too much free disk space. :)


> >Released about two weeks ago.
> 
> See how enthused about X I am? :)

Aye. Hope you have the opportunity to switch over sometime soon, I
think OS X is by far the best modern desktop OS. (And I'm a Linux
advocate.)



> other times, it's a bootable device, but then it hangs early in the
> install with a repeating "waiting for device" error that's been
> diagnosed as meaning "Your CD-ROM drive is too old for Panther's
> liking."

Ouch. No, better not try to shoehorn the wildcats into that system
then.


> I keep getting the impression that Darwin is a NetBSD derivative.

Quite possible. I don't know. :\


//Peter