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

[Kentaro Hara]

>
> I've seen many people expressing their inability to improve the binding
> code because of its being written in Perl.


Although I agree that the complexity of the binding code partly comes from
the fact that it's written in Perl, another big reason is that current code
generators are more complicated than necessary.

Now that JSC is the only engine in WebKit and V8 is the only engine in V8,
we both can remove a bunch of unnecessary abstractions and IDL attributes
that had existed to share code between JSC and V8. In short-term, this kind
of clean-up will improve our situation a lot. (I'm doing the work with the
highest priority in the V8 side.)





On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Dirk Pranke <dpranke at chromium.org> wrote:

>
>
>
> 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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> --
> Kentaro Hara, Tokyo, Japan
> <https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev>
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