Re: texinfo in Google Summer of Code

[Per Bothner]

On 2/10/21 1:07 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> For the long term health of the Texinfo project, more people do need
> to understand this Perl code. Nobody has come forward to write new
> back-ends to generate other output formats (LaTeX, Org Mode,
> MediaWiki...). I don't think it's much to do with the fact it's
> written in Perl.

It doesn't help - Perl was never all that popular, and is less so than
it used to be.  I never really learned it, though I did figure out how
to make some changes to the code.

I recently (and belatedly) converted the DomTerm backend from C to C++,
though I've only started to make use of C++ functionality.  That is one
advantage of C++, especially given an existing C codebase: You can
incrementally C++-ify and refactor it.  That would have been a better path
for makeinfo - but of course it all depends on what volunteers want to do.
However, I think more people know C++ than Perl and I think it is easier
to write efficient readable code.

However, that's water under the bridge, unless someone wants to
resurrect the old makeinfo C code and migrate it to C++, preferably
learning from the Perl code in designing the C++ classes.

> I have some ideas what the problems could be
> but would like to hear what others think.
>
> Did you try to understand the code and fail?  What were the difficulties?
> Could the code be changed to make it more accessible?

I was able to make some local changes, and add/change the generated html
in places.  However, some more complicated things I couldn't figure out
in the time I spent on it.  The control flow with the table-driven
processing was confusing, especially for anyone not fluent in Perl.
--
        --Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/