GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition [LWN.net]

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 16, 2005 1:20 UTC (Fri) by thedevil (guest, #32913)
In reply to: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition by dhess
Parent article: GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

dhess wrote:
On the other hand, gtkmm is a really nice C++ wrapper around the GTK+ APIs, and there's gnomemm for the GNOME side, too. Unlike Qt, they make extensive use of the STL, and they support the signal/slot model without the need for a pre-processing step ala moc.

If you keep the runtime typing inherent in the signal/slot mechanism,
I don't see what the advantage of C++ is. If you read any of Stroustrup's
books you know that the whole point was to marry OO and static typing.

And signals/slots aren't even the worst instance of this in Gtk; that
distinction belongs to the horrible string-named properties. That's
back to Smalltalk, folks. When shall we ever learn?

There's a reason why pretty much any Gtk app, if run manually from
an xterm, will spew an ungodly amount of warnings.

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GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 16, 2005 22:32 UTC (Fri) by dhess (subscriber, #7827) [Link]

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble understanding your comment. Are you talking about gtkmm, or GTK+? I was talking about gtkmm. It sounds like you're complaining about GTK+, which, as I said in my original comment, I don't like, either, so I think we see eye-to-eye on that one, at least.

GNOME v. KDE, December 2005 edition

Posted Dec 17, 2005 4:05 UTC (Sat) by thedevil (guest, #32913) [Link]

Sorry, I forgot that in a flamewar one's supposed to pick a side :-)

If I should summarize the sentiment behind my post (and that's the
important part, right?) it's approximately this: Gtk design is so wrong
that not even a C++ wrapper can save it.