[GRASS-dev] GSoC proposal "Higher level API for C and C++" : need for discussion

[Vaclav Petras]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be
> wrote:

> >please take a look at GAL project from 2008 [1]. Ma
>
>
I didn't really work out the differences to GAL project but this GSoC
project should be less ambitious, much more limited, cover smaller part of
the functionality, and perhaps be less high level. Another difference would
be that the GSoC proposal aims to cover both C and C++ APIs and is limited
only to module development (no GUI-aware/friendly API).


>
> I don't really agree with the idea that
>
> "Unfortunately, its [GRASS'] development is stagnating because of small
> interest
> from fresh and young developers. This is partially caused by the fact that
> its design and
> concepts are overcome by modern practices in a software development."
>
> I do not see GRASS stagnating. And even though GRASS uses an "old"
> language,


I think C is fine and that might be more clear now than in 2008, but C++ is
popular too. However, the motivation for GSoC is make writing of modules in
C and C++ easier. We may discuss if "development is stagnating because of
small interest" is true or not, but for sure we can have better interface
which would attract more people. There are people writing custom C or C++
code for basic geospatial things which GRASS libraries do in a way which is
better than what they have or aim for.

More pressing problem however are the modules which use variants of
all-in-memory and tiling-on-disk raster reading modes. I'm not sure what is
the state now, because MarkusM fixed a lot of those, but some addons were
not included into core because of custom segment libraries (and even now
they have custom all-in-memory implementations).

I imagine that it's unpleasant if all you believe in is OO, but that
> doesn't necessarily make OO the naturally best way to go... :-)
>

Similarly to Python API, OOP is not the only thing we should focus on. C++
is a multiparadigm language and OOP is just part of it (e.g. templates are
kind of big), plus there are different levels of doing OOP ("C with
classes" versus more complicated OOP). So yes, the student should be
familiar with more than just OOP.


>
> b) I'm afraid it's too big of a project for GSoC and that we would put the
> student in an uncomfortable position.


It should be much smaller than GAL project and it should be mostly
additions to API, not rewriting the libraries.

That's at least my idea. I hope this clarifies it a bit.

Vaclav
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