Re: Shawn and Backend inclusion
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) May 22, 2015
- 1390 views
It seems to me that the primary reason for including something in the backend is to make it portable, that is, to embed it into the interpreter when it cannot be written as part of the standard library as Jim described. Creating external shim libraries would be considered non-portable and change Euphoria from a single executable file into more of a runtime. Counter to that, I would argue that cramming a bunch of things into the interpreter would certainly bloat it up over time and that would be bad too. A good example is libcurl or libeay32 (SSL) - they'd easily add 1-2 MB to the interpreter each.
The other issue I see is that Wee is distributed with binary files outside of its source, namely the Scintilla shared libraries. If we were to pull Wee in as part of the Euphoria source, we would (should?) also include the source for Scintilla and build those shared libraries from source. Although, another option would be to just script the download of Wee from the web when we build the packages for distribution (zip, deb, etc.)
Just my two cents.
-Greg
