Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Hubert Figuiere <hub figuiere net>]

Jason D. Clinton <me <at> jasonclinton.com> writes:

>               * Lots of cool applications and innovations are happening
>                 in the Mono camp. There's apps. like F-Spot, Tomboy,
>                 Beagle, and Banshee being written way faster than they
>                 could be in C. Anti-Mono folks generally agree but think
>                 that high level languages should only be used for
>                 prototyping (the benefits of RAD don't outweigh the
>                 cons).

There also another solution that seems to be completely ignored each and
everytime in the equation: what about C++. C++ would allow lot of things to be
done easier than in C (look are how many lines of code you need to write to just
create a new gobject? why is there gob again?). That would probably solve lot of
issues people have with maintaining or writing C application for Gnome. 

For those who don't believe me, have a look at your friends of KDE. They produce
a huge amount of application written in C++ with Qt and sometime it looks like
Gnome is really lagging behind. Too bad for us, we have a very good C++
framework called Gtkmm (Thanks Murray and al. for this), even if it is not even
required (Ekiga and AbiWord are good examples of C++ application using plain C
APIs). On more advantage is that using C libraries comes for free. No need to
write binding or wrapper or whatever to use them. And it is fairly easy to write
C++ libraries that gets good C APIs

Just to outline that managed language are not the only answer to "C application
are getting harder to maintain".


Hub