From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Eric S. Raymond" Subject: Re: Python extension commands in git - request for policy change Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:30:43 -0500 Organization: Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs Message-ID: <20121212033043.GA24937@thyrsus.com> References: <20121125024451.1ADD14065F@snark.thyrsus.com> <50B1F684.5020805@alum.mit.edu> Reply-To: esr@thyrsus.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Patrick Donnelly , Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy , Michael Haggerty , Felipe Contreras , git@vger.kernel.org To: Sitaram Chamarty X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Wed Dec 12 04:31:13 2012 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git-2@plane.gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.180.67]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Tid2I-0007s1-72 for gcvg-git-2@plane.gmane.org; Wed, 12 Dec 2012 04:31:06 +0100 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754127Ab2LLDat (ORCPT ); Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:30:49 -0500 Received: from static-71-162-243-5.phlapa.fios.verizon.net ([71.162.243.5]:60452 "EHLO snark.thyrsus.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752853Ab2LLDas (ORCPT ); Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:30:48 -0500 Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (Postfix, from userid 1000) id D995944029; Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:30:43 -0500 (EST) Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-Eric-Conspiracy: There is no conspiracy User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: Sitaram Chamarty : > [snipping the rest; all valid points no doubt] I meant to respond to Patrick's post earlier. I haven't actually written any code in lua yet, but I've read the book; I think I get it. I've seen the effects of lua integration on another large project, Battle for Wesnoth. I'm not, despite conclusions some people here might have jumped to, religiously attached to Python. So I can say this: I think lua as a language is an *excellent* design. It is clever, economical, minimalist, and (other than the one ugly detail of 1-origin indexing) shows consistent good taste. It might be a good fit for extending git; I wouldn't be very surprised if that worked. However, I do have concerns about the "Oh, we'll just lash together a binding to C" attitude common among lua programmers; I foresee maintainability problems and the possibility of slow death by low-level details as that strategy tries to scale up. And, of course, one problem with calling back into C a lot is that you walk back into C's resource-management issues. My sense is that git's use cases are better served by a glue language in the Python/Perl/Ruby class rather than an extension langage. But my mind is open on this issue. -- Eric S. Raymond