What's today? April 2nd, I think? This idea is a day late and a dollar short, in my opinion. --linas Forwarded message: > From: Robert Graham Merkel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RFC: rewriting gnucash in Mercury > Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2001 16:16:36 +1000 > > Dave, you might like to forward this one on to gnucash-devel, if you > think it's appropriate . . . > > With gnucash is making good progress towards 1.6, it's time to start > kicking around ideas for the long-term future. Is the existing > codebase really the right tool to take us forward? Is our existing > mix of C and scheme appropriate? Or are the limitations of our > existing architecture too much, and should we be looking at something > more radical? The "core" gnucash developers have been looking long > and hard at this, and wish to present a proposal to the wider > development community. > > In essence, we believe that C and guile suffer significant weaknesses > - C's lack of memory management, the constant risk of dangling > pointers, the lack of polymorphic typing, and scheme's consfusing > syntax, lack of compile-time type checking, and poor performance > under load, and with the current interest of many developers in > testing and verifying the correctness of gnucash's code, these > languages are simply underpowered. Hence, we would collectively > propose that the gnucash codebase should be progressively converted to > the language Mercury (http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury), a project of > the University of Melbourne. > > Mercury is a logic programming language especially developed for > real-world projects. Initially designed to target compilation to C > (and, as such, the fastest logic programming language available), > it now supports compilation to a variety of high-level languages. It > has an extremely powerful and accurate type and mode system, supports > fully declarative I/O, has an excellent module system. Transition > will be quite straightforward, as a bidirectional C-Mercury interface > will be used to support legacy gnucash code. The nature of the logic > programming languages make sophisticated verification techniques, such > as program termination analysis, possible. CORBA and database > bindings already exist, so the only thing we need to do is develop a > language binding for GTK+. We're sure somebody from the wider > community will volunteer. > > Additionally, as well as targetting C, Tyson Dowd has been working > on a .NET backend for Mercury. This raises the fascinating > possibility of easy porting to Microsoft's next-generation network > environment. The core developers are all keen to work with quality > Microsoft software, and this may make the transition possible. > > Non-core developers may be concerned about the total absence of > resources to learn Mercury, and the opacity of the language. Don't > worry, after a course in predicate logic, or a few months using > Prolog, Mercury's extra features will only take a few weeks of > consistent effort to learn. Besides, as long as we like it, that's > the most important thing - and, if needs be, you can contact the > originator of the Mercury Project, Dr. Zoltan Somogyi, whom all the > Melbourne University alumni on this list can verify is incredibly > helpful and loves dealing with newbie questions. > > Comments on this proposal are required urgently, but should be done > taking into consideration the date at the top of this email. > > ------------------------------------------------------------ > Robert Merkel [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > <telsa> I left my client on #gtk+ overnight and there was nothing > in scrollback at all except quit/rejoins. > <bighead> telsa: well its been that for, I think 3 days now > (ever since started coming back on IRC) > <telsa> Clearly they are busy implementing telepathy, > and dog-fooding it. :) > ------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > gnumatic-internal mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.gnumatic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnumatic-internal > _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnumatic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
