[Sugar-devel] python hulahop article

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 20:26, Todd Whiteman<twhitema at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>>
>> On 7/27/09, Benjamin Smedberg <benjamin at smedbergs.us> wrote:
>>
>>> Our primary goal is making the fastest and best web platform available.
>>>  XPCOM has served its purpose but causes our code to be very verbose and
>>> hard
>>>  to maintain, in addition to some significant performance penalties.
>>>  Seamless inter-language communication was a nice (intentional)
>>> by-product of
>>>  XPCOM, but is not a core goal as our codebase continues to evolve.
>>>
>>>  All of the web APIs are defined and tested in terms of their reflection
>>> into
>>>  JS. The future for PyXPCOM and the other language bridges is to be a
>>>  reflection of JS, not a reflection of binary-xpcom.
>>
>>  oo.  that would be veeery interesting.  JS and python are much better
>> matched than most people realise.
>>
>>>  >> We aren't going to drop it but we are already
>>>  >> optimizing around it, and removing it in future APIs.
>>>  >
>>>  >  mmm, history will tell if that's a mistake or not.  please don't
>>>  > remove it _until_ the new API which replaces python-xpcom is fully
>>>  > completed.  that would _definitely_ be a mistake.
>>>
>>>
>>> We are not going to intentionally break other reflection layers without
>>> good
>>>  reason, but neither are we going to slow down with improvements to the
>>>  Mozilla platform in order for non-core functions like PyXPCOM to catch
>>> up.
>>
>>  have openkomodo and miro, just two projects that i know of that use
>> pyxpcom, been made aware of this?
>
> The ActiveState (Komodo) team is aware of the future ideas/plans to
> deprecate the current XPCOM infrastructure, though obviously we are not
> initially thrilled with the idea, we do understand the need for
> Mozilla/Firefox to continue to innovate, change and evolve their platform.
>
> A lot of the changes that Mozilla have been bringing into the platform are
> making it less of a need for us to require Python over JavaScript. The
> available code libraries and multi-threading are two of the biggest reasons
> why Komodo uses Python.

You may want to see what the Gjs and Seed guys are doing then, if you
haven't already. I guess that something good in this regard will come
from Litl though I don't know anything solid about it.

> I don't know what will happen with the Mozilla Python integration when this
> XPCOM deprecation proceeds, but I would like to think that as long as their
> is a way for other languages to integrate with the new platform (like their
> is today with XPCOM), then the community will step up and make it happen.
>
> So, just try to keep a door open for Python :)

+1 ;)

Regards,

Tomeu

> Cheers,
> Todd
>