[Tapioca-devel] Thoughts on languages, toolkits, etc.

[The U. H. <er...@ba...>]

Still plugging away on the network transport. At the moment I'm plugging away
at the client side of the certificate/session key service. 

An issue of sorts has come up. The server side of the certificate chat really
doesn't want to be C++. C++ is just too %!@@## verbose -- e.g. the
read-a-block-from-network routine that would take 15 lines of Python is around
90 lines of code. I still agree with the choice of using C++ -- e.g., if I did
not have C++ strings, I'd need to write a block "class" to handle chunks of
data that are being encrypted/decrypted, whereas with C++ strings I can "just
do it" without worrying about NUL characters in my strings -- but I have no
intention of writing huge amounts of code in C++ if it's avoidable.

I'd like to make the server side be in a high level language (which C++ isn't).
Java is a possibility -- but it takes forever and a half to start up a Java
program. That's what happens from carrying around 40mb of bloated runtime
environment. 

I looked at Perl. Ick. I looked at Perl again, it's just so darned useful, but
ick. Python, I can't use, we know why. I looked at Ruby. There's a new book
out. The book is available online. Interesting. I'm going to look at this
closer. Ruby isn't "popular", but if the choices are Perl or Java, it may be
worthwhile. I like Java, I've been doing a lot of programming in the language
over the past two months, but the size, the platform limits (it's really only
supported on Linux, Windows, and Solaris), and the sheer *size* of the JRE is
terrible. 40 megabytes of bloated runtime environment? Hell, the whole of
BRU-Pro was less than that! 

I looked at GUI toolkits also, for those of us afflicted with Windows.
WxWindows appears to be a rather bloated toolkit but does work both on Windows
and Unix with reasonable look and feel. 
FOX (http://www.cfdrc.com/FOX/fox.html) looks interesting -- it appears to be
somewhat similar to QT in its functionality and basic philosophy, but without
the licensing difficulties. It appears to have the widgets we'd need, but
somebody should probably take a look at it. Maybe someone doing Windows
programming who wants to use something that has a real layout manager :-). 

I'm not saying that we should dump Java (though this is the time if we are
going to do so), just that Java is turning out to have some real downsides,
such as forcing more code into C++ due to the enormous amount of time it takes
for the Java runtime environment to start up. There's a reason why virtually
all Java programs are multi-threaded rather than multi-process. Unfortunately,
our componetized dataflow architecture isn't well suited for multi-threading.
This may be the right time to investigate alternatives. 

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
mailto:er...@ba...  Web: http://www.badtux.org
  
  "Emacs is a nice OS, but a weird editor." -- M.J. Blom