[webkit-dev] Rewriting binding code generator, maybe?

[Dirk Pranke]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Timothy Hatcher <timothy at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Apr 10, 2013, at 6:32 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> Can we rewrite CodeGenerator*.pm in Ruby or Python?  I feel that the
> current code is very hard to understand and hack on.  In particular we have
> CodeGenerator.pm and CodeGeneratorJS.pm (CodeGeneratorV8.pm has been
> removed), and we need to merge them anyway.
>
>
> They can't be merged. We also have CodeGeneratorObjC.pm. (And internally
> we have CodeGeneratorSafari.pm.)
>
>
> I've seen many people expressing their inability to improve the binding
> code because of its being written in Perl.
>
>
> I've also seen people express their frustration for our tools currently
> written in Ruby and Python. I personally find Perl fine for this task and
> don't see a need to rewrite things just because.
>
>
I'm sure Perl is a fine tool for the job, if you happen to know Perl, but
Perl code is generally much less approachable than Ruby, and Ruby less so
than Python.

Of course many if not most of the Python zealots have gone elsewhere :).

I believe in Blink-land there may be a reasonably concerted effort to move
the stuff Chromium still uses to Python where possible, and obviously this
is one such case (as Eric alludes to earlier), so it does seem like it
would be nice to be able share the code and make the rewrite generic if it
wasn't too much additional work, there was interest in doing so, and the
rewrite was gonna happen anyway.

Otherwise I'm quite sympathetic to the "ain't broke" argument here :)

-- Dirk
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