[Bf-committers] Blender roadmap article on code blog

[David Jeske]

When I fix bugs in unfamiliar projects, I spend 90% of my time getting it
to build and playing sherlock holmes tracking down weak-linkages like
dynamic-typed variables and weak-linkages (like strings used as enums in C)
-- and 10% of my time actually trying to understand or fix code.

In strong typed code (C, C++, C#, TypeScript, etc) and a modern IDE (Visual
Studio or one of its many clones), that 90% shrinks dramatically, as I can
see, understand, and explore the types of variables immediately. I
hover-over a variable in the IDE it shows the type. I hit "goto
declaration" it takes me to the type-declaration. No project wide grep or
guessing at the type of that dynamic-typed "a" paramater.

> How about Python Traits? Note I have no idea how difficult it would be to

> use Traits as a wrapper for Blender's API, although Enthought does
provide a
> Traits based wrapper for VTK so I'm sure it would be possible.

I'm not very familiar with Traits, but from a quick look it appears to be a
run-time assignment validation and format coercion package. It does not
appear to contain any compiled time variable type information, or the
ability to do type-aware code-navigation or completion.