Dear Hurd Developers, I attempted to send below e-mail to the hurd-maintainters, but I found out that this e-mail is presented on Savannah, although posted in 2011. I hope that I am doing this right.
Aside from what I mentioned in the e-mail forwarded, I want to add two other bullets: *) I'd like to upgrade GNU MIG's IDL language to a more modern syntax, and enhance MIG with asynchronous handling *) I totally forgot to mention Emacs LISP and PERL as a possible target languages, my bad Further I would have a suggestion at changing the name of Mach Interface Generator to MIG Interface Generator, the latter would be useful for any GNU (free) software in the need of either vertical or horizontal IPC. Please read on, Regards, Sjoerd -------- Doorgestuurd bericht -------- Onderwerp: GNU MIG Datum: Fri, 28 Sep 2018 21:10:40 +0200 Van: Protonmail Me [<sjoerd.van.le...@pm.me>](mailto:sjoerd.van.le...@pm.me) Antwoord-naar: Protonmail Me [<sjoerd.van.le...@pm.me>](mailto:sjoerd.van.le...@pm.me) Aan: hurd-maintain...@gnu.org Dear GNU Hurd maintainers, I have over 10 years of Geospatial (GIS) system implementations, and have found some time recently to actively be able to start producing free software. Within this spare time, I'd like to create a GIS framework, different from libraries such as GDAL and different from applications like QGIS or GRASS, finding them inadequate. Also, having experience with a number of proprietary systems, I can safely say that utility organisations using them suffer more than gaining something out of them. For me, reason enough to embark on this train. However, having seen what is absent and what is necessary, the first thing that came to mind is a decent, reasonably efficient IPC solution. REST (which is fast enough for most things) just doesn't work for the monstrous data GIS systems produce and consume. Within corporate realms, Protobuf is establishing itself slowly, but is not what I am looking for. Then I remembered that Mach uses MIG and I remembered that the GNU project was still attempting to create a microkernel, and has GNU MIG. On my own computer, I made a quick test whether GNU MIG could be compiled on GNU/Linux, and without to much hassle (linking some platform-independent Mach stuff in), it did. However, I notice that I can not seem to find any design complete documentation either on functional or technical level. The MIG preprocessor (migcom) does segfault easily and there are some other twitchy things (such as calling mig without any arguments just puts one back in the shell without warning or usage line). I would be happy to embark on a mission to * Work out how GNU MIG works and write some documentation (if this is wanted, I would like to know whether to use GNU Info or RST and whether some documentation is available somewhere) * Make GNU MIG a bit more stable * Extract platform requirements such that GNU MIG can be used on both GNU Hurd and GNU/Linux * Provide a C++(17?) generator * Provide other generators (Python, GNU Guile, etc) Of course, if others are already doing this, I would rather just like to join them Kind Regards, Sjoerd van Leent
