Re: [Themis-dev] Another dev? Another code base we can use?

[<Ar...@co...>]

> > I should note something, lest there is a misunderstanding and you all think I 
> was looking to replace Themis or something.
> >
> > I was actually looking to see if anyone might be interested in implementing 
> the SEE EMCAScript Interpereter for the Themis project....  The person from the 
> UZI project replied and told me about the UZI project, why he didn't use Themis 
> in his project, etc.... In the course of things, he suggested using UZI as a 
> starting point instead of the Themis code base (because it's parsing is further 
> along and more complete than Themis).
> >   
> I apologize if you think that I was implying that, but reading your 
> message combined with what I saw on the web site gave me two distinct 
> impressions:
Sure.
In actuality, I wasn't replying to your post.  After I wrote my original message, I thought it would be a good idea to post that disclaimer (so nobody misunderstood), but couldn't get around to it till several hours later.  I actually did not read the replies until after I posted that.

> Perhaps if the roles were reversed I might have said something similar, 
> but I think I would probably have taken a slightly different approach 
> stating that I'd be willing to work with him to see how both our 
> projects can benefit from cooperation.
> 
> Again, I apologize if I'm overracting, and I don't mean or intend to 
> scare you or anyone away from this project or any other through overly 
> emotional responses. But this one got to me.
> 
> Raymond
Sure, that's ok.
My first reaction wasn't the best either.  However, as you reconsider it, there are lots of possibilities:
*) His native language is not English, so he may not smooth over his words as much :)
*) He may not understand all the nuances of why things are done the way they are done for Haiku.  This may motivate him to do things differently.
*) He may have some points that we should consider.  Who knows, maybe a best of both worlds can be accomplished through some discussion (if his project does indeed contain some very useful material).

Regarding him not understanding the Haiku/Themis approach to programing, I consider that a failure on our part -- as I always assume it is my responsibility to explain things to someone when they are misunderstanding something and I know how to explain it to them.  I had considered the possibility of having a resource to help new developers understand Haiku and why people develop native BeOS/Haiku apps.

In the case of this individual, maybe something can come of your suggestion of cooperating with him.  I'll see if he comes online later... he probably should start posting here if he plans on getting involved in any way. :)

Anyways... regarding UZI,  do you think that this project might be of use?
Here's some stuff he sent me via email:

What's in UZI:
HTML error resilient parser with HTML Strict and Traditional DTD validation
DOM engine
HTML Attribute validation
CSS 2.0 parser
(soon) CSS 2.0 dynamic rule selection in rendering
CSS box model based layout and reflow computation, including CSS table 
model
(soon) Javascript engine
URL related stuff

CSS:
Interestingly, he says "Themis CSS code is good. It's probably the best part of Themis. To be honest, I've thought about using it 2 month ago, but I finally decided to make my own so it's more homogenous."

And finally some notes about Themis:
[Keep in mind the following: Like most other people, when I'm presented with a strong statement, I can get emotional about it tool.  However, it is often to good to look things over and consider what does this person mis-understand, or why do they think that?  If they seem to be misunderstanding something, I take that as a great opportunity to explain the part they misunderstand.  In the end, their view on the issue is usually much better, and sometimes it might dramatically change things for the better.  In area of programming, it might mean gaining another Haiku developer -- that develops apps the Haiku way. :)]
Anyways, here's his comments:
I've used this programming scheme before (well, Win32 message programming I mean). However I've dropped the idea of message based task management. If you think about this, the application is only always doing the same task in the same order (HTML fetching -> HTML parsing -> DOM CSS mapping -> CSS box rendering) everytime. This means that you pay the message queue cost between every subtask while you really don't need to (no one else is using this message anyway). Sure it looks like your application is more modular, but in reality it's not, because all modules still depends on each other (structure declaration for one when passing objects in messages), and it adds useless the OS messaging queue dependency.

In UZI application part, I'm using a thread pool. Each thread can execute jobs (like fetching documents from server). However, from the parsing to the mapping it's a single job.

I'm more concerned about memory handling than making the parser run in a separate thread than the renderer. UZI memory allocation all goes to a specific interface (BaseAllocator) that can decide to reuse objects and so on. There is more performance to gain from a correct memory allocation than from multithreading something that is inherently linear and sequential.