Hello --

On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Sean Russell wrote:

> James Britt (rubydev) wrote:
>
> > Why is C code more difficult to maintain? Isn't Ruby itself written in C?
>
> You can assume everybody working with Ruby knows Ruby.  You can't assume
> that everybody working with Ruby knows C.
>
> One of the reasons we use Ruby is because Ruby is easier that C; ergo, C is
> more difficult.  Ergo, it is more difficult to maintain.

Possibly, though Ruby programmers don't have to maintain Expat; it's
being actively maintained.

> Yes, Ruby is written in C, but this is one of those neccessary evils.  If
> we had a Ruby -> Native compiler, I'd wager we'd drop the C dependancy ASAP.
>
> > code?  Do we need to *control* expat to use it?
>
> Arguably, yes.  You'll notice that Ruby doesn't use the Perl regexp code,
> or the GNU regexp library.

But it does use other libraries, like Gtk.  I'm not opposed to pure
Ruby XML utilities, but I don't think it's an either-or choice.

> >> XMLParser isn't much faster than the native Ruby XML parsers, except in
> >> Stream parsing, and it is much slower in many other common XML tree
> >> operations.  I don't see any reason to take on the burden of maintaining
> ....
> > "isn't much fater" is still faster, and I would see using expat for tree
> > operations, mainly for stream processing.

[...]

> I'd also rather not see two different XML processors bundled with Ruby, for
> obvious reasons.

I'm not too worried about the bundling issue, especially if something
like RubyGems takes off.  (Ryan?)  This could lead to a more
modularized view of a "standard" Ruby installation.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack / candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav / shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav