Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 14:16:32 +0200 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What's the interest in standard tools rewritten in perl? Message-ID: <19970817141632.FT54182@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.95.970812152451.1820L-100000@mail.cdsnet.net>; from Jaye Mathisen on Aug 12, 1997 15:29:35 -0700 References: <Pine.NEB.3.95.970812152451.1820L-100000@mail.cdsnet.net>
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As Jaye Mathisen wrote: > I can always call it something else (newnewsyslog?), but I was > wondering if FreeBSD Inc would consider utilities that were not > written in C? If the advantages of the prospective rewrite would outweigh the disadvantages (like slower startup and higher CPU load), there are usually only objections by the (not very large) ``anti-bloatist club''. Some of the tools have already been rewritten in Perl, think of Wolfram Schneider's vastely improved catman(1), or my version of whereis(1) that replaced the crippled 4.4BSD version. Whoever has been looking into the 4.3BSD (Net/2) version of whereis(1), and who at least knows how scripting languages work, and what their advantages are, will certainly quickly agree with me that rewriting it in Perl was the better way out. I assume Wolfram's reasoning with catman(1) was similar. The 80 % accepted opinion of the core team is that new languages, and scripting languages in particular, might have their right to exist if they really offer advantage when and where they are used (like easier code maintenance, much improved features, etc.) We are in the 1990's, not in the 1970's. But before you're going to rewrite something that does already exist, look whether it will be justified. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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