XDC2012: Programming languages for X application development [LWN.net]

XDC2012: Programming languages for X application development

Posted Oct 4, 2012 20:40 UTC (Thu) by louie (subscriber, #3285)
Parent article: XDC2012: Programming languages for X application development

C/C++ certainly doesn't help, but focusing on the language problem (particularly by waving your hands and saying ObjC "has special features") is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. You can't:

1) easily deliver X apps to users (compare "set up a webserver" to "package something for anything more than a single X platform)
2) easily make money on X apps (compare web services, or worse yet mobile apps)
3) easily make X apps location/device independent (compare web services on both scores; mobile at least on location independence)
4) easily make X apps collaborative (consider the process of sharing a document in, say, Abiword/OOo v. gdocs).
5) easily take advantage of the desktop's advantages (local data search, rich inter-app integration, whatever else it is that you think desktop apps rock at- they're all hard to take advantage of, so people very rarely write apps that make you say "I could only do that on the desktop.")

Until those issues are fixed, you can use the exact same languages and technologies (literally, you can already to this - write a Java app, like the successful folks at Android, or HTML+Javascript via local webkit) but X development still won't be appealing.

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What? No word about testing?

Posted Oct 5, 2012 10:15 UTC (Fri) by rwst (guest, #84121) [Link]

Probably the biggest reason for all the crappiness in Linux GUI applications is the lack of a testing paradigm with most languages used for the purpose. The notable exception is Java, but that still has no GUI testing framework in its dev kit. At the time people hear about something like FEST they have switched to another profession.

Recently I commented about a bug and got from the dev the answer "The tracker can be accessed here." but I had given him a link of a distro tracker issue before which he simply ignored. No wonder his application was crappy if he did everything to sweep bugs under the rug. As a dev, I'm willing to go miles to have a full tracker regardless of how a many issues are open, because I *know there must be hundreds of bugs, I just haven't found them.