Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Ryan McDougall <ryan mcdougall telusplanet net>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 17:46 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 14:51, jamie wrote:
> > 
> > There are plans underway to port Java onto Mono (probably using one of
> > the free java VMs as a starting point). That should hopefully keep most
> > people happy and be in keeping with GNOME's support for multiple
> > languages.
> 
> The presence of a C#/.NET dependency is a problem for many - rather than
> the absence of Java. See my copious blog discussion ;-)
> 
> Also, don't mix the question of "what can you write an app in?" with
> "what language syntaxes are used in GNOME itself?"
> 
> No matter how cool our runtime, writing GNOME itself in a mix of 20
> different languages would be pretty insane from a maintainability
> standpoint. Though one statically-typed and one "scripting" language
> might be nice. I don't want to go trying to fix a bug and find out the
> relevant code is in Fortran or something.
> 
> Havoc
> 

I think that writing core libraries in a hodge podge is definitely bad,
but we should probably be writing those C for speed/cross-platform/etc
reasons anyways. Choosing to write your pet app, whether that pet is
called Evolution or GUselessApp, in a different language is a calculated
risk the maintainer should be able to take. Sure you might get some
"Sawfish" situations, but I think that problem would be more than made
up by the increase in developers who can write GNOME apps period.

Cheers,
Ryan