Re: Possibility of Colorer usage (was: php syntax)

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hi, Walery!

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Walery Studennikov wrote:

> At  Mon, 17 Sep 2001 14:43:24 Pavel Roskin wrote:
> > I agree with you that the syntax highlighting engine is ugly.  But I don't
> > think that it's realistic to use Colorer for two reasons - it is
> > not under GPL and it is written in C++.
>
> The second problem is quite solvable: C++ features are used
> at their minimum and it will be easy to rewrite in on plain C.

Are you suggesting to fork Colorer library?  Or you mean that the author
should rewrite it in C?  I personally have no desire to maintain a forked
version of Colorer.

I understand from the documentation that Colorer library doesn't provide
pure C interface, since the constructors for some classes need to be
called.

Then at least some parts of MC need to be compiled by a C++ compiler, so
that the constructors are called correctly.  I don't know of a generic way
to call C++ constructors from C.

I'm not against C++, but it's very important for MC to remain very
portable, and C++ compilers are still not as widespread as C compilers.

Maybe I'm missing the point.  Could you explain your plan in greater
detail?

> About the first problem: now colorer uses "Apache Software License".
> Is it acceptable for us?

I think it's Ok for GPL'd software to link against any libraries, even
against the ones under restrictive commercial licenses (e.g. libc on
Solaris).

Incorporating the code would be a legal problem, but I don't think it's
going to happen anyways - MC already has code incorporated from other
projects - cooledit and samba, and it can be considered a failed
experiment.  In the case of cooledit we have an inevitable fork from the
original code and in the case of samba we have code that gets too few
"eyeballs" and hasn't been merged for years.

> If yes, maybe usage of colorer can be considered
> as our plan for the distant future?
> It is too tasty dessert to miss it.

Why not just write a separate editor in C++ using Colorer?  MC works with
external editors just fine (last time I checked).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin