Re: If you would write git from scratch now, what would you change?

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Nov 27, 2007, 01:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20071127012013.GG14735@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <e5bfff550711261125i92fb057i85d7217b18cd495d@mail.gmail.com>

Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Nov 26, 2007 5:46 PM, Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jakub Narebski wrote:
> >
> > > If you would write git from scratch now, from the beginning, without
> > > concerns for backwards compatibility, what would you change, or what
> > > would you want to have changed?
> >
> >  - "git-gui" would be written in Qt (ducks)
> 
> But...wait...Qt would require...(I'm scared to say!)... that awful,
> painful, hopeless thing called C++. Probably you didn't mean what you
> said ;-)

Heh.

I'll never port git-gui to Qt. Because of that awful, painful thing called C++ that it uses. I despise C++. No, please don't start a C++ language war again on the list. :-)

I recently considered porting git-gui to XUL, as nobody has ever said "Firefox isn't native enough on my OS!". It also (maybe) has the benefit of having a large developer base (everyone and their dog has coded in HTML and Javascript before, except maybe Linus).

But XUL doesn't support launching a process and connecting pipes to its stdin and stdout. I started to try and create an XPCOM extension to provide that functionality from NSPR and started to run into major problems compiling the XPCOM plugin, getting the necessary interfaces implemented, etc.

In the end I was able to recreate the bulk of the main git-gui UI in XUL in just an hour or so, but spent days trying to just do a basic thing like "git diff-index --cached -z HEAD" and consume the result. I never even got that to work so I just gave up on the idea.

So git-gui is in Tcl/Tk for the long-term. However I'm going to try and port git-gui over to the Tcl/Tk 8.5 "tiles" extension (if it is available on your system) so we can get better looking native widgets. I'll still fall back to the old style widgets for Tcl/Tk 8.4 so existing users aren't forced to upgrade to 8.5 just to use the latest git-gui. (But really, 8.5 isn't that hard to build and install...)

-- 
Shawn.