Replacing C (was: Re: The end of the beginning is in sight)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Frank Nicholas <frank at nicholasfamilycentral.com>:
> If you haven’t seen [Grumpy], you might be interested.  Not sure of the quality (experimental?)
> 
> Google boosts Python by turning it into Go:  

Yes, Gary turned me on to this earlier in the week.  Grumpy is extremely
interesting, as a path forward for reposurgeon if not for NTP.

Right now it has two disqualifying problems for NTP purposes. One is that
they've abandoned support for C extensions.  We can't live with that; we
need to keep the C calendar code accessible because hand-translating it
to Python would be a bug-prone nightmare.

(I actually looked at this possibility pretty hard. C extensions are useful
but they're definitely defect attractors - I would have strongly preferred
the userspace tools to be Python all the way down.  It wasn't practical.)

The other problem is that I'm not satisfied it's production-quality yet.
Nor do I think it's likely to be by the time we need to transition.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>