5 ms·

What is the difference between porting and complete rewrite? I thought they are the same?

scottlamb 5y ago
> What is the difference between porting and complete rewrite? I thought they are the same? As with so many terms in computing, there aren't universally agreed definitions. But in the author's post, I read "porting" as switching languages while changing as little as possible vs "complete rewrite" as redesigning/rearchitecting it along the way.
- azakai 5y ago
  To add to that, I would say that simple forms of "porting" can be done without really understanding the overall architecture. You just need to understand each line (or a few lines around it) at a time. I understood the post to mean something like that, which sounds like a good plan here, to minimize the risk of adding bugs. And in comparison, a "complete rewrite" would require a full understanding of the big picture design of the original code, come up with a perhaps different one in the rewrite, and keep the differences in your head as you go (or, forget about the original design entirely and solve it from scratch - and keep that in your head as you go). Far more work and risk, and it would have been a bad choice here.
- cwalv 5y ago
  If that's the case, it seems unlikely that they'll be able to get the hoped for performance improvements
travisd 5y ago
I think here “rewrite” means completely changing the internal structure of the code (while preserving the functionality) whereas “port” means copy the structure of the internal code with as little modification as possible. And it’s hard to do the latter in Rust since Rust is not garbage collected.
jacobr1 5y ago
Porting can involve a spectrum of changes. If you are porting to a different language, often for bug-for-bug compatibility you try to maintain the same rough code and class/object structure as the source codebase. This might give you some non-idiomatic code at first, but once you have good test coverage you can refactor. In this case you might maintain some of the upstream code structure to better match future changes.

> What is the difference between porting and complete rewrite? I thought they are the same? As with so many terms in computing, there aren't universally agreed definitions. But in the author's post, I read "porting" as switching languages while changing as little as possible vs "complete rewrite" as redesigning/rearchitecting it along the way.

azakai 5y ago
To add to that, I would say that simple forms of "porting" can be done without really understanding the overall architecture. You just need to understand each line (or a few lines around it) at a time. I understood the post to mean something like that, which sounds like a good plan here, to minimize the risk of adding bugs. And in comparison, a "complete rewrite" would require a full understanding of the big picture design of the original code, come up with a perhaps different one in the rewrite, and keep the differences in your head as you go (or, forget about the original design entirely and solve it from scratch - and keep that in your head as you go). Far more work and risk, and it would have been a bad choice here.
cwalv 5y ago
If that's the case, it seems unlikely that they'll be able to get the hoped for performance improvements

travisd 5y ago

I think here “rewrite” means completely changing the internal structure of the code (while preserving the functionality) whereas “port” means copy the structure of the internal code with as little modification as possible. And it’s hard to do the latter in Rust since Rust is not garbage collected.

jacobr1 5y ago

Porting can involve a spectrum of changes. If you are porting to a different language, often for bug-for-bug compatibility you try to maintain the same rough code and class/object structure as the source codebase. This might give you some non-idiomatic code at first, but once you have good test coverage you can refactor. In this case you might maintain some of the upstream code structure to better match future changes.