Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks [LWN.net]

Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

Posted May 5, 2009 20:44 UTC (Tue) by ms (subscriber, #41272)
In reply to: Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks by dgm
Parent article: Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

"""So, basically your defense of Mono is that... it's newer?"""

No, and I've no idea how you managed to reach that conclusion. I listed several substantial advantages to modern languages over ancient languages, as have you. Gnote didn't have to do any design. It's a clone. With no disrespect intended to the author, it's a mechanised process to take a program in one language and translate it to another language. This is what compilers do. I suspect that whilst Gnote is faster, it will be less secure and will leak memory. It'll also be harder to debug when it crashes, and its code base will end up bigger and will reimplement features and properties that .Net/Mono gives you. The code will end up less maintainable and degrade in quality faster.

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Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

Posted May 5, 2009 22:42 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

To clarify my comments about C code (I saw this dicussion in /Comments/unread and didn't get the context).

None of my complaints regarding C strings applies to C++ using the STL. C++ STL strings are modern and powerful. I don't know if gnote uses them or not (a lot of people write C code in C++ for some reason) but if it does, complaints about "obsolete languages" aren't valid. C++ is a messy monster but all the modern functionality *IS* there.

STL and Boost I think

Posted May 7, 2009 7:01 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

He certainly mentioned using boost which is full of C++ Templatey Goodness

Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

Posted May 7, 2009 13:38 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

You ara at it again. With C++0x still unpublished it could be argued that, in fact, C++ is more "modern" than C# (I assume that's the language chosen to write Tomboy). Also, grabage collection is hardly anything "modern". There are several "ancient" languages with automatic memory management (and reflection, generic programming and any other feature C# can claim, and some others it cannot).
The rest, only time will tell, but it will be interesting to keep a eye on both.