Is it time to plan a move to Go?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Jason Azze via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:
> Whoops. I failed to list reply.
> 
> On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 4:44 PM, Jason Azze <jason at azze.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 4, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Eric S. Raymond via devel
> > <devel at ntpsec.org> wrote:
> >> Here's my big question about the next year of development:  should we
> >> be moving the codebase out of C to Go?
> >
> > Would this be a direct translation--warts and all? Do you refactor as
> > you translate?
> >
> > I've worked on infrastructure projects before where the task was to
> > move a complex service to a greenfield with the mandate "don't change
> > anything about how the service functions, just move the thing, we'll
> > optimize later."
> >
> > I can testify that the temptation to rebuild things as you go in this
> > scenario is overwhelming at times. We get into a lot of friendly
> > arguments about what "warts" to preserve for the sake of being able to
> > trace breakage to a very limited set of changes.

Pretty direct, I'd say.  I wouldn't even have introducing *methods* as
an initial goal.  My experience is that trying to re-engineer while you
translate is a dangerous rathole - you can easily end up at a place
where you've lost track of the semantic mapping between the original
code and the translation, and are just wandering around thrashing.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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