Re: future of zsh

[Zoltan Hidvegi <hzoli@cs.elte.hu>]

Richard wrote:
> As to zle and completion, it would be great if this could be moved
> to a module, or to a seperate library.  I had similar ideas when I was
> maintainer.  Unfortunately, zle and completion use so many of the
> internal data structures (just about all of them actually), this would be
> very difficult.  I believe a better idea is to move some of the

That's not a problem.  A mudule can use any zsh internal function/variable
etc.  The important thing is that the main code should not use anything
from the module.  The main part of zsh does not use zle + completion as I
know except the read builtin and the compctl builtin.  The later should
probably be moved into a separate file.

Adding loadable modules on an elf system is trivial (I have already done
that on linux) and it is probably not difficult on other systems which
support dlopen/dlclose/dlsym.  On systems modules cannot be statically
linked to zsh as a compile-time option.  The difficult part is to write
configure tests about how to compile and link dynamic modules and figure
out a consistent interface.

> internals of the completion code into the hash table code.  This was
> part of the motivation when I rewrote the hash table code.  Essentially
> each object would know how to complete itself.  Again, this is non-trivial,
> but a worthwhile goal.  I believe that a general mechanism for hash table
> searching would simplify both the completion code and the spell checking
> code.

Yes, it may be doable.  The zsh code gradually becomes more and more
object-orientated.

> zsh 3.0 is a great increase in modularity over previous version, as well
> as being much more maintainable (take a look at the zsh 2.5.03 code if
> you don't believe me).  But I believe this is a process that should

Oh, I believe it.  I've seen parts of it.

> continue.  In particular, the exec.c code is still somewhat of a mess.  If
> I find some time, I will probably do some work on this myself.

That would be great.  When you do that do not forget to use a profiler.
Sometimes I think I understand most of exec.c but then I wake up.

Zoltan