[ic] Akopia in PHP

[Doug Alcorn]

"Fiber @ VH" <fiber@virtualhideout.net> writes:

> Is it possible to make the Akopia Cart PHP instead of Perl?

OK, I'll bite.  Maybe that way some of the more serious IC developers
can studiously ignore this thread.

Have you downloaded and looked at Interchange? We're talking about
close to 2MB and 55,000 lines of perl code.  This represents _years_
of effort (and probably tens of years of man-effort).  Rarely to
project survive the "lets port this entire code to some other
language".

To put this number in perspective, I worked for 3 months to audit
3,000 lines of C code.  In the end I was able to cut the number of
lines in half (and not just by removing comments); it was just really
bad code.  Assuming Mike and company could work twice as fast as I
did.  That would still be 25 months of work.  Even if they worked
three times as fast as I did it would still be almost 20 months.
That's two _years_ just to be caught up to where we are today.  Even
if they could work four times as fast as I did it would still be a
year.

I'm not setting myself up here as some great programmer; I"m just
being realistic.  How many developers that know both perl and php are
going to be working on the port full-time?  How many developers work
on IC as it is now full-time?  I'm betting there's not many more than
one that works full-time on the core library.

And what would all this effort gain?  Would more developers be
attracted to it?  Would it run faster?  Would it be any easier to
learn?  I think the answer is "no" on all accounts.
-- 
 (__) Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
 oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1  61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
 |_/  If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
      free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.