Coral's code, what's left undone and how it could go forward.

[Andrea Interguglielmi]

This post is just a recap on the state of things with coral's code base at this moment in time, should anybody be willing to keep developing it privately or to contribute to the main repo.

What's left undone:
- The python bindings are not complete, you might find a method is missing or it can't be overridden in a python subclass.
I used to bind things as I would run into the need for them, this has proven to be a nice way to progressively add coverage and avoid undertaking the tedious task of binding everything in one go (and risking in introducing lots of bugs).

- The core is not as "vanilla" as it should be.
The default set of nodes that are compiled and loaded by default in coral's core are too CGI related, some of them also introduce dependencies that would not be mandatory otherwise.
Fortunately, even these built-in nodes are just part of a plug-in that just happens to be loaded at startup, such plug-in should be compiled as a separate module and only loaded optionally.

- Collapsed-node referencing:
A network can be collapsed in a single node and then saved and reused many times, however, if one is to modify the content of such node he won't see all the other instances update accordingly.

- Compiling coral is a pain in the butt:
It'd be great to have the dependencies already compiled for the main platforms and ready for the build process, thus not requiring users to go through the build and install process of all those libraries.

Going forward:
Integrating patches and coordinating an open source project is quite a bit of work, I surely can't do it while my day job forces me to do other stuff and imposes restrictions on what I can do on my spare time.
The project needs a new maintainer, not a single individual, but a studio that understands the benefits of sponsoring an open platform and that can drive development forward in a real production scenario.

For anything else, I'll be here to keep helping anyone who wants to explore the code base to take or learn what they need.

Thanks,
Andrea