[Sugar-devel] python hulahop article

[Todd Whiteman]

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.

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 :)

Cheers,
Todd