On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 08:41 +0100, Martin Ritchie wrote: > I was going to mention this early but it must have slipped my mind. > > Just wondered why we are now using ruby to generate the framing? > > Were the xslt, python or java approaches too complicated, inflexible > or is ruby a better dependency to have?
IMO ruby and python are about equally convenient dependencies, java is a very complex dependency to have and is painful to have, if all you want to do is build the C++ code. I don't know anything about the xslt generator, but I'd guess that it would be hard to use xlst for any processing that's complex. As far as I know we've never had a python generator. I think that it would be better to use python for the code generation just to minimise the total number of dependencies (given that python and ruby have pretty much equivalent functionality). But now we've got the generation in ruby it's hardly worth porting just for this reason only. > > I really feel we should have a single method for generating our > framing across all languages.. I used to think the same, but I'm not so sure now, given that the requirements of the different languages are different. It also means that the languages are tied together by all depending on the same generator even though the code generated must be different. > if indeed it is really work writing a > generator in the first place. It is surely worthwhile as it means that there is only one source for the framing - the specification XML which is canonical. Hand writing this code would be boring, and fraught with errors, not to mention tedious as there are now approximately 120 classes automatically generated. > The amount of effort we have expended in > creating generators we must have been better just writing it by hand. > The framing has only significantly changed once in the last year but > we have had at least 4 generators! I can only count 3 (xslt, java, ruby)! Andrew
