Re: How about adopting Kotlin in GNOME?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Sat, 2017-11-18 at 14:11 +0000, Tony Houghton wrote:
> I've been thinking about what language I should choose if and when I 
> start writing a significant program using G* libraries. I don't want
> to write GObjects in C any more. All that boilerplate, casting
> macros, manual set up of vtables and explicit reference counting. I
> will make mistakes with it.

I thought I saw that Javascript was going to the language of choice for
GNOME - yet I haven't seem much else on that front.

Your question is an important one - I've been thinking the opposite -
that perhaps it is best to abandon the 'nicer' languages and just go
back to C.  More boilerplate perhaps - but less drama.

> Vala is very attractive, but I'm afraid I have to side with the 
> doomsayers.

Ditto.  It looks like C# to me - mono on GNOME was great - but the
momentum is gone.  Not something I want to make a wager on.

> So there's Python. 

The one contender with C, IMO.

> supported. But... its runtime has a poor reputation for efficiency,
> and  it can't truly multithread on multiple cores.

As someone who had many tens of thousands of lines of code in Python -
the multi-threaded issues are ***GROSSLY*** exagerated.  It is not a
real-world problem.

>  Its GI bindings are  somewhat opaque ie it's difficult to find out
> what members a class has, or a function's signature, if separate
> documentation hasn't been provided.

Absolutely true;  to often the answer is "look at the C docs and try to
translate".  Which is a serious waste of time.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam whitemice org> GPG D95ED383
OpenGroupware Developer <http://www.opengroupware.us/>