On Monday, Nov 3, 2003, at 12:11 Europe/Rome, Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
<snip/>
Pretty cool stuff. If they add continuations, I'm all for throwin rhino down the drain.
[at least, from a community perspective, we wouldn't be basing our entire architecture on branched code of a almost-dead community hosted in a location that doesn't care about java]
Scary statement, but unfortunately so true...
Before everybody goes wild and crazy, let me rephrase.
As Chris said a while ago, we are, as a development community, much more active than the Rhino one. The license is compatible, the codebase under CVS, versioned, controlled and all that.
There is *NO* chance that the code is going away or dying out because we control that branch.
From a community perspective it seems "weird", but it's not a danger on our future.
Open source works out of friction and environmental pressure. If nobody merged continuations back into the main trunk is because nobody really cared. If things change in the future (say Rhino gets major contributions over at mozilla.org that we can't move over), pressure will change and actions will be taken.... even more today that we are basing our code on it.
It's like saying that we are basing our entire code on Java, which could be dead in a few days if Microsoft puts a few billions of their 40 they have in cash into the table and buys Sun.
*this* is scary.
but nobody is working on a clean-room JVM just to avoid that fear.... just like you don't go around with a iron umbrella to avoid the possibility of a metheorite striking your head.
What I'm really saying is that it is an uncomfortable situation, but there are other situations that are much less comfortable to me.
And Torsten is definately right: if javascript is hard to sell to your customers already, imagine something called "Groovy". that's scary as well.
but anyway, Groovy is not an interpreted language, so, for now, unless they resort in using Brakes-like bytecode mangling hacks (which, IMHO, kills your performance dead), it's hard to see a future in the continuation realm.
But I would love to see it happening just to see what Darwin gets out of this.
-- Stefano.
