| |||||||||||
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)Posted Mar 8, 2008 20:30 UTC (Sat) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)In reply to: MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) by drag Parent article: MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)
I think that Vala is fast becoming the solution for that. Vala is basically modern syntax, not unlike C# and Java, but tailored for GNOME. It compiles into C/GObject. http://live.gnome.org/Vala That said, Python is a great way to write apps as well. If speed isn't an issue, I would probably prefer Python.
(Log in to post comments)
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) Posted Mar 8, 2008 23:45 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] What is the logic behind this Vala thing? From an outsider's point of view the history looks rather like:We want to pick a programming language. C++ is too complicated and who needs all that object crap anyway? Objective-C is too little known. We should just use plain C.Please tell me they're not just rediscovering the wheel here.
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) Posted Mar 9, 2008 1:44 UTC (Sun) by pjdc (guest, #6906) [Link] It seemed to me at the time that they were thinking something like "People are really excited about C# and how quickly they can put simple programs together with it. Can we provide something similar and avoid this extra potentially problematic runtime dependency?" Of course I may have missed the part where they trumpeted their genius and proclaimed uniqueness.
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) Posted Mar 9, 2008 6:39 UTC (Sun) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link] > Of course I may have missed the part where they trumpeted their genius and proclaimed uniqueness. On their behalf, I am offended. I talked to the Vala people on IRC several times and I believe I have read most or all of their website material. In none of this have I seen any case of them saying how great they are. Quite the opposite in fact (e.g. the FAQ makes it clear how they do not think they are better than similar languages/tools). Vala was founded by two normal guys as a personal project (no commercial backing or anything like that). They have my respect for their project's achievements so far, and I have never seen them be anything but humble about it.
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) Posted Mar 9, 2008 6:34 UTC (Sun) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link] Well, as I see it (please correct any inaccuracies), the situation is as follows. When GNOME and GObject were created, the options were C and C++, basically. C++ has various portability issues, and a slightly different model of object orientation was deemed more relevant for a GUI toolkit (e.g., the need for signals as a basic concept). So GObject on C made sense. However, GObject syntax is quite verbose and not easy for newcomers to use. One specific issue is that subclassing takes a lot of boilerplate code. Hence, over the years, nice wrappers were made for GObject, in e.g. Python. PyGtk is a joy to program in. However, there remains the need for a way to write nice foundational code - you don't want basic library functions to be in Python (for speed reasons, mainly). You really need something like C or C++ for those. But on the other hand, you do want the benefits of modern languages like Java, C# and Python, with respect to assisted memory management (no messy pointers and remembering to deallocate), clear syntax, etc. Hence a few people, on their own - no commercial backing - decided to start the Vala project, which lets you write modern code that compiles into C. Things like signals which were originally thought to be so important as to be necessary for GObject are now part of the language itself. That is, the syntax of Vala is tailored for GObject. So, in summary, I wouldn't say "they rediscovered the wheel" is completely accurate. I **might** agree to that regarding GObject - but not Vala. Once Vala is stable, it will in fact be something quite unique, that is missing from all other platforms - in what do you write basic libraries for KDE, Windows or OS X? C, C++ or Objective C basically, AFAIK. With Vala you write code with all the productivity of Java and C#, but it compiles into C. That's a big benefit. (For apps, PyGtk might be even more productive, or PyQt etc. etc. on other platforms, that's true.)
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) Posted Mar 9, 2008 8:05 UTC (Sun) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] Recall that the first C++ compiler, Cfront, actually outputs C code, that you then need a C compiler to process. Vala makes good sense -- it builds on top of standard C compilers (GCC, ICC, etc.) and the GObject type system, but provides C#/Java-esque bindings. But without the bloat of a heavy JIT runtime (or a runtime library, if using Java with GCJ). As more and more library bindings are added to Vala (a process that can, in the best cases, be automated), hopefully the inconsistencies in the GNOME platform's C libraries can be reduced as well. So it's a win-win scenario, even if you yourself do not use Vala for your programming.
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) Posted Mar 9, 2008 20:17 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]
|
|||||||||||