Re: Re[2]: [stellation-res] Proposed Changes in Bugzilla (#31581 )

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 18:10, Jim Wright - IBM Research wrote:
> At 04:38 PM 2/12/2003, Marco Qualizza wrote:
> Python also has a number of warts, of course (but it suits my own quirks 
> better).

Python is pretty nifty. It's certainly got some strange quirks, but 
they don't affect normal day-to-day programming. In general, it's
quite a clean an pleasant language. I've really enjoyed programming
it. Not exactly a quick language, but acceptable for most things.

Back when I started Stellation (it was called Coven in those days,
and I was working on it all alone), I tried doing some benchmarks in
a bunch of languages to get a sense of which ones would perform
acceptably for implementing Stellation. (This was before anyone
at Research had seen Eclipse, and I expected to build it using an
emacs integration.) 

I implemented the LCS-based diff algorithm in Perl, Python, C++, Java,
and OCaML. (OCaML is my personal favorite programming language.) I
ran it on a roughly 500-line input file. I don't have the exact
numbers any more, but the order-of-magnitude stuff was:
- OCaML: 0.5 seconds.
- C++: 0.75 seconds.
- Java (IBM JDK): ~3 seconds.
- Perl: ~3 minutes
- Python: ~2 minutes.

So Python does pretty well in the scripting category, but it's slow as
hell when compared to the others. (The really impressive thing about
that OCaML number is that that's running in the OCaML *interpreter*. It
went faster when compiled to machine code. But even the OCaML
interpreter was able to beat C. (OCaML has some interesting properties
that allow it to do things like String comparisons incredibly
efficiently. It can essentially do the equivalent of interning all
strings automatically, so that string comparison becomes integer
comparison.)

> Ruby is another interesting possibility (which I have no experience with)
> A comparison of Ruby and Python is here:
> http://www.rubygarden.org/iowa/faqtotum/abk8uZHYjd2bA/b/1.11.7.2.5
> Not being a Perl hacker (and disliking Perl's syntactic variability immensely),
> I'm not drawn to it immediately, but am willing to learn more about it.

Ruby is a language that I really want to learn. I haven't yet had
the time to sit down and learn it. Unfortunately, it's not
particularly Java friendly. There is an effort to build a Java
based Ruby interpreter (sort of the Ruby counterpart of Jython),
but it's still nowhere near ready for prime time.

I really like the look of Dynamic java: http://koala.ilog.fr/djava/.
It's darned close to 100% compatible with standard Java (meaning that
almost all standard Java code can be run using Dynamic java - the only
exceptions being quite esoteric things like comparing Foo.class with
Class.forName("Foo"), and the behavior of named local inner classes.);
but it also supports very nice lightweight scripty type things. So we
can define an API in Java, let people write lightweight scripts, 
with a natural migration path to convert them into full-blown plugins.


> >  BTW are you aware
> > > that the Eclipse folks tried to add a scripting facility to Eclipse and 
> > then
> > > backed off as they could not get a satisfactory result apparently. The 
> > first
> > > cut code is in the CVS repository.
> 
> Yes, I knew about that. I'd like to see it revived: it's a clear lack in 
> the current platform.

Yeah, there were actually some research types involved. (Wasn't it
Jason Crawford?) If it's the one I'm thinking of, it was Javascript
based. Still, it's a shame that they didn't go farther with it.

> OTOH - for our purposes, we don't necessarily need fully scriptable control
> over all aspects of Eclipse;  an API focused on SCM-related tasks, behaviors
> and packaged UI components might be enough to do quite a lot.

In fact, a whole lot of what we'd want to script could be done with
very minimal UI support. But if we do something that's totally java
compatible, then calling Eclipse JFace stuff directly from the script
should be possible.

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/Home: markcc@xxxxxxxxxxx