[arch-general] pacman new generation

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Tuesday 22 Nov 2011 12:20:25 Magnus Therning wrote:
> - Many of these languages improve the ability to reason about the
> behaviour of the program.  This _can_ improve quality. HOWEVER, pacman
> doesn't strike as a tool that suffers from bad quality, there seems to
> be a development team that fully understand the crucial role that
> pacman plays in Arch and they behave accordingly in relation to
> rolling out updates.

We should also bear in mind that most of what Pacman does is speed-critical 
database-like operations.  I'm a huge Ruby fan, but I'm happy to admit that 
it's crazy slow compared to C.  It simply doesn't make sense to rewrite it in 
another language; C is just about as fast as you can get.

However, it *does* make sense to move most of the performance-critical 
sections into a shared library, for which bindings can be written for other 
languages.  That way, you can quickly play with some concepts and write tools 
in easier languages on top on the library.  That's actually pretty much what 
has been done already.

Paul