Re: .Net/Mono and C# in GNOME? Do we really need it?

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Tomasz Sterna wrote:
> Hello.
>
> May I ask what is with all the push for C# apps in GNOME?
>
> The main beauty of GNOME is that it is slick and unbloated.
> Do we really need to throw a virtual machine in it?
>
> If we really want to develop code in object oriented language, with all
> the fancy syntactic sugar, garbage collection etc.
> can't we just use D to achieve it?  http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
>
> It has all the cool features of modern languages (like C# or Java):
> C like syntax, OOP, nice templating, closures, garbage collected memory
> management, dynamic and hashed arrays, real strings, inline assembly,
> exceptions, unit tests, direct interface to C, unicode support ... and
> many, many more,


Although I agree with you wrt to the D language - it rocks!, I dont 
think specific languages matter all that much (and we dont need to start 
another language flame war)

whats important is native code has much higher quality (performance, 
memory usage and bloat) than VM based languages and hence it will be 
preferred in cases where speed/memory usage matters most.

Due to Gnome being usable on lower end machines and thin clients, its 
unacceptable for core apps like the panel, file manager, daemons and a 
few others to be VM based and this is more of an unwritten rule in GNOME.

All other apps which are optional in nature can of course be written in 
any other language as they matter less so I think GNOME has the right 
balance here.


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/