Remove Lucee DIALECT in 6.0

Zackster · December 15, 2022, 8:53am

I think we should remove the Lucee dialect from Lucee 6.

nobody is really using it, we can leave it in the 5.4 branch.

We can remove a lot of cruft and there are size, memory and minor performance benefits to be gained

lucee/Lucee/blob/6.0/core/src/main/java/lucee/runtime/tag/TagUtil.java#L255


      
          
          
		}
          		catch (Throwable t) {
          			ExceptionUtil.rethrowIfNecessary(t);
          			return;
          		}
          		PageContext orgPC = ThreadLocalPageContext.get();
          		try {
          			ThreadLocalPageContext.register(pc);
          
          
			// MUST MOST of them are the same, so this is a huge overhead
          			_addTagMetaData(pc, cw, CFMLEngine.DIALECT_CFML);
          			_addTagMetaData(pc, cw, CFMLEngine.DIALECT_LUCEE);
          
          
		}
          		catch (Exception e) {
          			ConfigWebFactory.log(cw, log, e);
          		}
          		finally {
          			pc.getConfig().getFactory().releaseLuceePageContext(pc, true);
          			ThreadLocalPageContext.register(orgPC);

dswitzer · December 15, 2022, 12:53pm

I suspect it’s usage is so low, because there’s so little documentation about it. I’m not sure how much development time has been spent on it or to support it, but it would seem like a good candidate to remove and reduce the code footprint. Certainly if it could be made optionally, that would make good sense.

Any idea how many people are actually using the functionality?

Zackster · December 15, 2022, 1:00pm

hardly any bug reports, little documentation, it’s no longer maintained

dswitzer · December 15, 2022, 1:12pm

Then it seems like it should be killed. With limited development resources, I think it make sense to depreciate features that aren’t be used so focus can remain on the more critical parts of the language.

michaelborn_me · December 15, 2022, 2:01pm

I 100% agree, this should be removed to slim the Lucee engine and reduce complexity. I’ve never used it and never seen any code use it.

bennadel · December 15, 2022, 2:08pm

I’ve only ever heard of it, never looked into it.

AdamCameron · December 16, 2022, 12:57am

It was something that was discussed as a direction for Lucee to go - away from the shackles of Adobe’s hold on CFML - but never really fleshed out in any sensible way, largely due to… erm “language design disagreements”. But then a version of it was chucked into Lucee anyhow.

That was pretty much when I concluded “you lot have no idea what you are doing, do you?” and parted ways with what seemed like a good project back in the Railo days, but clearly lost its way shortly after Lucee started.

So… yeah… def drop it. Should never have been in there in the first place.

Zackster · December 16, 2022, 2:57pm

first cut of a PR to do this

Josh_Knutson · December 19, 2022, 4:45am

I tried to use it years ago for an issue where adobe needed the app.cfc to be in root but Lucee needed it in the root/public folder, originally my solution was to make an app.lucee file but that didn’t seem to work, so just renamed that one on Lucee server packages.

Hugh_Rainey · December 19, 2022, 7:22pm

When this first came up a few years back I was a little excited about the whole thing. Especially the tag option of removing the cf from the front of the tag and it looking more like so:

current - <cfscript>
proposed - <:script>

I don’t know, it seemed sexier. . . .

But if it’s not going anywhere, sounds like it should go.