[CMake] improve the CMake language?

[Gonzalo Garramuño]

Juan Sanchez wrote:
> I was reading exactly the link you sent, and the same one you accused
> Brandon of not reading.  If there were supplemental materials, you
> should have sent them.  I am not a lawyer.
> 

To Juan:
Yes.  The best place for any license question about source code is, as 
usual, the source code.  In ruby's case, its source code is in SVN at:

   svn co http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/trunk  ruby1.9

That's where you will find LEGAL which has probably the most up to date 
status of each file not entirely written by the ruby team.

If you need further clarification about a source file, you should ask 
probably in the ruby-core's mailing list.

Also, this is only about the (most popular and currently faster) C Ruby 
we are talking about.  There's several other ruby interpreters which are 
under other licenses.

To Brandon:  Sorry, yes, that was a mistype. I really meant Ruby is dual 
licensed as GPL and its own license.

Anyway... why are you guys so concerned about cmake's license?  To me, 
as long as the code is open source and forkable, that's all I care for 
cmake.  I'm not planning to make money selling a fork of cmake, borrow 
its source code, use cmake as a library nor embed it into another 
program, which are the reasons I might prefer a BSD/MIT license.


> To be honest, the only compelling languages I've seen so far in this
> discussion is lua and tcl.  This is because they are small and appear to
> be ideal for embedding.
> 

Sure.  That's from your POV.  For me, a language without good and easy 
OO is a no-no as experience tells me it will sooner or later run into 
scalability and maintainability issues.  That makes TCL and Lua to me 
only minimally better than cmake's language in the long run.

For me, I would accept either Python or Ruby as a better alternative, 
even if they are not as small.

TCL and Lua are only better for embedding if you were to need cmake to 
be multithreaded or if cmake would need to initialize a clean 
interpreter without quitting (two things, afaik, not needed or currently 
used in cmake).
Otherwise, there's not much difference with embedding Ruby, Python, etc. 
   Perl is the only language I would say that has a very difficult API 
for embedding.


> Not that speed is super important, but I know of at least one hosting
> provider making exceptions for ruby scripts, because they just take way
> too long to run.

That's pretty funny.  Ruby (1.8) scripts run about the same speed as TCL 
(ie. neither one is known to be a speed daemon).  Ruby1.9 (to become the 
official ruby in 2008) runs at about the speed of Python (ie. much 
better than TCL).
Lua is certainly a faster language in terms of VM and numeric 
computations.  But for io, string, regex, etc. you are not likely to see 
a big difference.

The next link is *very* un-scientific and I don't endorse it.  But it is 
still an okay website to at least give you a very rough idea of performance:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=python



-- 
Gonzalo Garramuño
ggarra at advancedsl.com.ar

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