Re: time to rewrite dpkg
On Thu, May 20, 1999 at 08:39:32PM +0200, Marek Habersack wrote:
> > Of course, you are entitled to your opinion. But the decisions are made by
> > people who to do the work.
> Not in this case. This is not their graduate project, nor an experiment.
> It's a package which the entire Debian distribution relies on
You're wrong, reread what Aaron said. The CURRENT dpkg is what the entire
distribution relies on. The CURRENT dpkg is written in C. You should be
happy.
If you believe it would be better to rewrite dpkg in C, go for it. More
power to you!
> > The size of the language or the size of the binaries?
> binaries, of course. Who cares about the language?
Interesting. So you prefer bloated program code instead of bloated binaries?
The time a human needs to understand and maintain a program is less
valuaable to you than a few kilobytes of source code? People read program
code, but they almost never read binaries directly.
> > The language was carefully designed to avoid bloat of the binaries. C++ does
> Dream. C++ does bloat programs.
Some compiler bloat. The language does not.
And bloat is put a bit too simple. I don't care about a few kilobytes if it
has direct and noticeable positive effect in the source code.
> > and cleaner. About 50 percent of code is error handling. Use of exception
> > can reduce the amount of actual program code tremendously, which does
> > decrease the size of the program code (hence the binary). AND it is easier
> > to understand.
> You would be surprised what problems people have with all the try/catch
> blocks.
You would be surprised what problems people have with all this pointer
arithmetic.
You would be surprised what problems people have with all these regular
expressions.
You would be surprised what problems people have with all these parentheses.
You would be surprised what problems people have with all these gotos.
You would be surprised what problems people have with all these mnemonics.
Did I get my point across?
> > Use of the standard library is another point. The standard library makes the
> > program code easier, and really does not increase the overall code, because
> > if you don't use it, you have to replace it with your own code, which is a
> > source of errors, too.
> You are talking about things like STL or other template-based libraries?
> Then they will increase the binary size, and they will do it significantly.
How scary. What exactly is the problem with a bigger binary?
> > > The other is, C++ is in a constant state of flux.
> >
> > This is plain wrong.
> >
> > Your knowledge of the C++ language is a few years behind of current
> > standards and implementation.
> C++ isn't in state of flux anymore, true, but egcs (and it's the only
> compiler around on the GNU platform which can be used to do serious C++
> programming) is.
See, I am the maintainer of libgtkmm. This is a huge wrapper library around
Gtk, which uses a lot of templates, classes, derivation, whatever. The
maintainer (currently about three people are actively working on the code)
were able to maintain compatibility even with g++ 2.7.2.3 (which is
horribly broken in every respect) until recently. I don't see them rewriting
their code everytime with another egcs release.
Marcus
--
"The purpose of Free Software is Free Software.
The End and the Means are the same." -- Craig Sanders
Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
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