[crossfire] Moving server towards a modularized system?

[Brendan Lally]

On 1/17/06, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
>   True.  I imagine dependencies to be fairly standard C dependencies.  But I
> could imagine someone writing a plugin in C++ with appropriate wrappers.

This point (more than any other) is potentially alarming. Currently
crossfire is written in C and python, with some perl scripts doing
some minor things. If this range of languages is increased, there is a
danger that it would include languages outside the range of competence
of the existing developers, or outside the range of languages which
are well supported on some of crossfire's target platforms.

Whilst it might be that $NEW_WHIZZY_FEATURE would be very easy to
write in D, for example (or some other $OBSCURE_LANGUAGE) it is
unlikely that most systems running servers have a suitable compiler
installed or that most existing developers would be able to adequately
maintain code written in it.

Whilst C++ on its own isn't greatly objectionable, there must be some
guidelines as to which languages would be permissible so that we don't
end up with 20 different modules in a dozen different languages half
of which were known only to their original author who has since
disappeared.