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From: | Brandon J. Van Every |
Subject: | Re: [Chicken-hackers] why Chicken? |
Date: | Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:20:21 -0800 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207) |
Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 1/31/07, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:I see two approaches: - a recruitment strategy that attracts massively more open source developers to Chicken. So that we get out of the tens and into the hundreds of developers. If I had an entire team working on build issues, we wouldn't have any build problems, and nobody would be doing a ton of boring build work. - a brilliant technology that automates binding work.Failing the latter, I don't think the former is likely to happen until we have basic pre-packaged bindings for many of the things that developers want to do.
"Many" implies an utter lack of focus. If we build everything, they will come. Heh, not!
Is there something more specific you think developers should be doing with Chicken? Something that can be Chicken's "killer app" or "killer problem domain?"
I know that for me, this is supposed to be games. But I just can't get there when I'm being distracted by build issues all the time. I'm going to have to learn to say "no," unless it's either really easy or really important. Actually, if it's really easy, someone else should probably be doing it. I would amend that to read, "really easy for me, but difficult for others."
Writing bindings is easy for small scale tasks such as wrapping a single medium sized C library. For anything larger, it's non-trivial even with the foreign code interface and/or SWIG. We should encourage all regular chicken developers to release eggs for the common binding tasks (we've already had huge success but there is always more to do).
What does "encouragement" mean? I don't think expressing a desire on a mailing list means anything to anyone. People have to actually do stuff. Mostly they have to organize themselves. Perhaps there's some way we could help them organize themselves? I had an idea about a job queue a few months ago. But there has to be a cadre of people who actually want to take things on. We can make wishlists until we're blue in the face; doesn't mean anyone's gonna do them. I suspect that getting people excited, and getting people to do real work, needs more than just a queue of TODOs.
On the core language, it might be nice to have constructs capable of handling the most common instances of C variable length argument lists. I'm aware that there are some fundamental C implementation dependencies here but if SWIG can do it (badly) it ought to be possible to encapsulate the basics in a manner flexible enough to be used in hand coding.
I'm not seeing how this is strategically important. It would be nice to have, but it sounds like an incremental feature request, not a core business strategy. We should use the bug tracker for this sort of feature request. That's what the CMake project does.
Cheers, Brandon Van Every
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