OpenEuphoria

Re: Euphoria needs more popularity!

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Sep 17, 2004
• 486 views

Terry Constant wrote:
> One responder (I forget who) indicated that he/she was not so
> much interested in fiddling with the interpreter source code
> as much as working with a good language. I am in that boat. I
> don't want to work in C. I want to work in Euphoria. So, to
> me, Euphoria being stable and robust is important.

The interpreter source code that I'm releasing is 100% Euphoria. 
No C. I assume that most people will not be interested in 
working on the interpreter source, but a few will. Some positive 
things I'm hoping to achieve with this are:

  - hundreds of people reading the source, finding bugs and/or
    suggesting improvements. Since I'm using the same Euphoria-coded
    front end in the official interpreter (not to mention the
    translator and the binder), I can copy useful changes directly 
    into my code.

  - a greater degree of confidence that Euphoria can be continued
    with or without RDS

  - people can develop support tools such as: 
       - an interpreter with a fancy Windows GUI debugger 
       - source code analysis tools, such as symbol table
         dump, stricter semantic checks, statistics
       - lots of other things I can't even imagine

  - open source "believers" will have to admit that Euphoria
    is (in a sense) open source

  - anyone can add or modify a front-end or back-end feature.
    In some cases I will incorporate that feature in my version,
    once people have played with it and refined it for a while.

  - the level of understanding of Euphoria, and the interest in
    Euphoria from an educational point of view might increase.
    Many, if not most, Euphoria users are hobbyists who are
    as interested in learning how a tool works, as in actually
    using the tool.

This could spawn a few competitors, but I think
as long as I keep improving the RDS version, competitors
will have a hard time grabbing market share. My official
version, with a C-coded back-end, will be faster.
You can easily translate the 100% Euphoria version to C to
get a pretty fast .exe, but it's still significantly slower
than my carefully hand-coded C back-end.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com