On 5/3/06, Ivan Krstic krstic@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
If you're going to rewrite it -- why not rewrite it in another language?
Any kind of core rewrite as a SoC project is sheer lunacy. In fact, the best thing that can happen is for this thread to die young :)
It's something we might want to discuss at Hacking Days, however.
How is it "sheer lunacy?" Do you doubt the abilities of good programmers? Google is paying $4500 for a student to complete this work. Student coding can go anywhere from $10 to $25/hr on average. Let's say it is $25/hr. That is 180 hours, or 4.5 40 hour weeks.
I am not proposing a FULL rewrite of the core, but a core re-organization. We keep the same classes, but just re-arrange things. We eliminate the use of global variables, assign visibility keywords to class functions, etc. This has been on the table for quite some time. Once this is done, you can start hacking away at the new core, replacing, deleting, and modifying classes as you see fit. The benefit to doing it this way instead of the natural progression of the Wikipedia development branch is that the Wikipedia developers don't have to spend the time "upgrading" the core to better OO. Their time can be spent doing actual development on MediaWiki. Think of the proposal as a glorified code audit/refactorization.
Greg