kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/17/2012 08:56 AM, Miguel Angel Ajo Pelayo wrote:
> Hi Dick, 
>
>    Thanks for your feedback on the ideas, it's really appreciated, I fully understand
> all of your points, as I'm on the same situation with some open projects and my little
> company. I supposed that most of the ideas were already in your mind, but if I didn't
> share them I wouldn't know now where do they converge with yours :-)
>
>     I really love the V8 engine, just played a little bit on embedded systems, and it
> works incredibly fast (it does JIT of the code and you get all the flexibility of
> javascript), and nodeJS gives all the functionality needed to access the underlaying OS
> and network, although I'm not sure if it's internal design makes it suitable to get
> integrated in other apps.
>
>      I'm also using SWIG to build interfaces to many languages, and it works incredibly
> well. I must test the swig-js and see how mature is.

We will be interested in finding out what you learn.  JavaScript seems to have a lot of
momentum now, and it needs to be looked at in detail.

With HTML5 giving it new life on the client, NodeJS giving it further life on the server,
its C++ like syntax, its standardization by a standards body, it has a lot going for it.

And for any one not already knowing a language, one is comforted by the fact that learning
it might serve a real purpose in other areas, (like when you go design your next webpage.)

Dick


>
>     Personally, I'd like to give "some blood" on the project as soon as I can and get
> familiar with kicad's code/design :-)
>      
>     Cheers, 
> Mike


> Two weeks ago I looked into adding support for V8.  V8 is google's javascript engine and
>
>     they use it under the chrome browser.  (You may already have a copy on your disk
>     now.)  V8
>     is very fast.  There is another project that sits on top of V8 called node.js.
>      node.js is
>     great at writing asynchronous webservers, and has been shown to actually be faster than
>     apache in some circumstances.
>
>     My measurement of doing it manually said that it is a lot of work.  However since then I
>     see some folks are trying to add the binding generation functionality to SWIG.  SWIG can
>     generate bindings for a number of languages, in theory.
>
>
>     http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.swig.devel/20373
>     https://github.com/oliver----/swig-js
>
>     This is an ancillary project, and not integrated into core SWIG from what I can tell.
>
>     node.js has gathered so much momentum that it is actually changing the choice of
>     languages
>     used on the server side for many web applications.  There are two reasons for this
>     that I
>     can see:  a) node.js on top of V8 is fast.  b) being able to use javascript both on the
>     client side and server side is attractive to many developers.
>