Hallo, Jamie Bullock hat gesagt: // Jamie Bullock wrote:
Actually, please don't be quiet! When this was discussed some time ago, you mentioned Python as a solution, and my feeling was that if I write a piece and it uses some database connectivity, I don't really want to have to distribute a Python runtime, relevant Python SQL module, [py] and all the respective dependencies with it. I just (at most) want to include an external, and the databse library it uses. If I write a piece, I can't reasonably expect a performer to resolve all of this themselves - it needs to "just work". I also want to minimise as much as possible the number of discrete components in the system that could possibly go wrong.
That's quite sensible. As soon as a DB interface is involved, one already has entered dependency hell, so minimizig further dependencies may be a valid goal. However a dependency on flext is just a dependency at compile time, so it's not really an additional dependency at runtime. A dependency on Python is kind of a dependency at runtime, as you need a possibly large Python installation. A dependency on Lua is also a runtime dependency, however as Lua is small, including it with the binaries will make the runtime dependency not matter.
An immediate advantage of both Python and Lua is, that once the system is set up (easy with Lua, a bit tricky with pyext), the actual object code is just a textfile with a script. Especially as so far it's not even clear, how the SQL class in Pd should behave, this would allow rapid turnaround cycles in development. (For example I posted a working SQL object in Lua some weeks ago, and in Pyext some months ago, that took me about 20 minutes to write, including help-patch. In the case of Lua, I had never written SQL code in that language before. I wasn't so fast because I would be a genius programmer, but because the language is easier and no compilation is involved.)
For a general purpose DB interface I would generally still prefer Python because threading is possible, but if ease of installation is a higher goal, Lua IMO even beats C-externals.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__