Re: [orca-list] Draft Proposed Two-Year Roadmap

[Alejandro Leiva <aleiva emergya es>]

On 09/09/10 02:25, Jason White wrote:
> Trevor Saunders<trev saunders gmail com>  wrote:
>
> > * Determine the performance benefits, if any, of re-writing Orcaâs core
> > * code in C/C++.*
> >
> > I'll be really supprised if it doesn't help a lot, I've seen a couple
> > places where all python and c / python speed has been compared in the
> > real world, and c / python is generally a lot faster, even when almost
> > all the time should be spent in system calls so the speed really should
> > be basically the same.
>
> Two other possibilities come to mind. I don't know whether these have been
> investigated and dismissed already, however.
>
> 1. Pypy, which, when complete, should out-perform the current Python
> interpreter significantly.
>
> 2. Vala, which is already a gnome project. It's an object-oriented programming
> language with built-in memory management that can be compiled into C code.
>
> My concern regarding C and C++ is the risk of segmentation faults due to
> pointer and memory management bugs, which seem to creep into C/C++ software
> despite everybody's best efforts, especially with multi-threaded systems.

Hi Jason,
                
        First, thanks guys for all the suggestions!

	Well, before choose or not another language to implement orca core we 
need to research in this direction

        1) Analyze current performance problems in Orca
	2) Define the new architecture defining a lightweight core and a 
plugins/component ecosystem.

	After that, we'll stay in the position of choosing a new language to 
implement the core or not.

	About using C, C++, python (or any of their interpreter 
implementation), vala or whatever new trendy language IMHO we should 
focus in performance against development confort.

	Nowadays there's ton of software implemented in C, C++ or C/C++ and 
they work well, in fact the vast majority of GNOME is implemented in C 
and AFAIK is behaving well ;-)

	Anyway, we're not in the moment to choose a new language or not, we 
need to reach other goals and decide after that.
        
        
Cheers,
--
Alejandro Leiva