[darcs-users] Re: darcs issues

Neal D. Becker ndbecker2 at verizon.net
Tue Dec 21 12:31:59 UTC 2004


Guido Kollerie wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 03:28:43AM +0100, Alexander Staubo wrote:
>> Neal D. Becker wrote:
> 
>> >There is one major stumbling block - and I would guess it may
>> >have been discussed here before - which is the implementation
>> >language.
>> 
>> I'm curious why you think this is a stumbling block, and also
>> what you think it's blocking in the first place.
> 
> So am I. As an end user I would only care about the aspects of a
> tool I deal with directly. These are amongst others (in no
> particular order):
> 
>     - applicability to the task I am trying to solve
>     - ease of use
>     - documentation
>     - stability
>     - performance
>     - support/expected life time of a tool
>     - platform availability
>     
> etc.
> 
> The last thing I could care about is the language the tool in
> question is implemented in. Sure, the language might affect the
> aspects I have mentioned above, but it is those aspects I care
> about not the language. As such I would ask about those aspects
> and not the implementation language.
> 

The issues I see are:

1) Installation on a variety of platforms

In order to really make serious use of darcs where I live and work, I need
it to work on the platforms we work with.  This includes flavors of
solaris, windoze (cygwin and native), and linux x86_64.  So far I have
looked at the x86_64 situation.  I have gotten some helpful advice from
this list on trying to install ghc on x86_64, but it's not a matter of just
doing "yum install", and I haven't yet done it - mainly because I need to
learn about the ghc build process, which seems to be somewhat unusual.

Well, all I can say is if I'm having some trouble getting darcs going on
x86_64, I'm certainly not the only one.

2) Availability of developers

This has been mentioned before, so I needn't elaborate.  Certainly the pool
of talent that is familiar with Haskell is a lot smaller than some other
languages.  I would still suggest that anyone who likes the elegance of
Haskell would be interested in Python.

3) Tools

Tools for some other languages, e.g., Python, to develop, interface, hook
into other languages are highly developed.  If a package is implemented in
say, Python, I know I can easily build on it.  While I see from a quick
reading of Haskell docs that some capabilities exist there to, they
certainly aren't widely known, and I'm guessing are much less mature than
for some alternatives.

For example, there are many packages to interface c/c++ and python. 
boost::python, for example, is truly amazing.






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