[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Plans for 1.12

[Artur Biesiadowski <abies@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tobias Bengtsson wrote:

> Why dont we use perl? Perl exists on more platforms than GUILE, more people
> know how to code it.

1) Perl is ugly. It wasn't designed it just grown one layer on another.

2) I agree that more people know perl, but scheme is easier to learn.
One would have to learn freeciv interface anyway and such calls will
compromise most of code, with all that is left being few loop/if
statements

3) Compare runtime size of guile and perl. Installation size. 

4) Guile is very easily embedded from C application. I don't know about
perl, but in most cases I've seen the opposite there - perl calling into
C code (like the JNI java methods). How easy is to embed perl and calls
single functions for evaluating things etc ? How well would perl garbage
collector interacts with C memory management in freeciv ? (I don't know
answers so maybe it is not a 'against' argument)

5) Guile/scheme allows you to run scripts in custom environment, not
exporting any dangerous functions like disk access etc. I'm not sure if
it is really important as all scripts will be less or more trusted, but
it is nice feature to have just in case.

6) As far as platforms are concerned, guile indeed wasn't running on
non-unix platforms last time I've checked, but there is another scheme
interpreter called mzscheme, which runs on more platforms. With simple
wrapper it is possible to choose one of them at compile time without
changing any code on either scheme or freeciv code.


Artur