MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)

> Because of this, there is a strong technical argument that libraries (at least, those
intended to be widely used) should be written with C interfaces, because
lowest-common-denominator C interfaces can be called by essentially every other language
whereas interfaces in "modern" languages mostly cannot. 


Well I don't have any problem with libraries written in C. It's code that is commonly used in
multiple applications and any sort of memory savings, language compatebility, or performance
is a has the largest amount of impact. Higher up on the application stack C is much less
attractive and it's benefits become more rarefied.

The issue is with *Official* Gnome and Gnome is far more then just system libraries, is it
not? You have browsers, utilities, nautilus, etc etc etc.

The OP is that Gnome should never use anything other then C, in anything it plans on including
in itself, to write anything because that is unfair to other languages. (?)

> Reread my posting: because it's bare unfair.

That's what I don't understand.  Why does it matter that Gnome needs to treat Lua, Ruby,
Cobol, <insert favorite small language>, or Python all as equals? What does it matter? How
does that make it a better desktop environment?

I mean being 'fair' sounds very cool and all. We are taught in gradeschool that being fair is
nice.. but as a basis for designing a desktop environment I do not see the real benefit.  It
could be that I am just ignorant, but I just don't see it.

What I see that your saying is that you'd rather see all non-C language support be equally
crappy rather then favor a few and make support for those those great.


> What's even worse, is to have to maintain a bloat like mono to support "official" gnome: I'm
sorry, but I see the monstruous amount of complex mono code lines as THE very big issue. It's
worse than java since the base technology must not be trusted at all (mono is viewed on the
computer market as a poor quality and inferior .net framework... thx for the poisonous gift).

Ok, then pick out something better. I don't care if Mono is seen as a second rate .NET. It
doesn't bother me one bit. In fact I don't care one way or another if Gnome supports Mono as a
'official' language.

(If you care about image so much you should pay closer attention to what they are saying about
Linux application developers clinging to C as the answer for everything...)

What I do care about is Mono is already supported, it's legal security is as fine as any other
language (say.. Java), IMO. It's a modern language, it's "good enough", and it's already being
used.  So embrace it.

> Coding in C *is* about "chasing" pointers and doing manual allocation. 

Yes, that's what I said and I think that for most applications it's a waste of time with
little benefit to end users or the quality of the application. I figure people should use C
were it's appropriate, but otherwise use something more productive.


> It does mean "I understand what's going on", "I have control", and "I depend already on gcc
complexity and that's fairly enough". Nowadays you have tools to assist you in order to let
you code properly (valgrind, gcc more and more verbose warnings, etc). Moreover my experience
demonstrates what you say is irrelevant: time spent on boilerplate code is minimal in
comparison of time spent on application logic.

So your saying that for programmers coding in C they can create applications just as fast and
create programs just as safe (given the same limited amount time) as if they programmed in any
other language? That runs completely counter to most everything I've ever read on the
subject...