It seems like there's some consensus on a JavaCC based compiler.
Should we open an JIRA issue and start to explore feasibility?
-Bryan
On Mar 6, 2009, at 3:03 AM, Esteve Fernandez wrote:
On Friday 06 March 2009 03:24:23 Mark Slee wrote:
That's pretty much my fault.
Actually the current Thrift compiler served its puporse quite
decently, but
the coming of new languages and features has made it (along with the
generators) a bit more complex and less easy to maintain.
I personally like Java and think it'd be a decent choice, but
there do seem
to be a decent number of people out there building services who
seem to
vehemently hate Java. Lots of *nix systems do not have a JVM or JDK
installed by default -- and it's pretty annoying for users who aren't
writing services in Java to have to install it to build the compiler.
I'd argue for writing a parser in Java and use a template engine
(Velocity,
Freemarker, etc.). Why not Python? Dunno :-) I think Java is more
widely
deployed, it has better tools for scanning and parsing and more
developers.
Etch, another incubating project with similar goals to Thrift, uses
JavaCC
for parsing and Velocity as template engine for its compiler and
generators,
even though it also emits C#
Using a template engine would make development of new features and the
inclusion of more languages much easier. Instead of having to hack a
generator to add some new feature, we could simply supply a new
template
file. For example, at some point in the future I'd like to build a
generator
for Javascript, and if we used a template engine, it would be a
matter of
writing a minimal generator and a bunch of templates.
Cheers.
