GNOME Platform Stormclouds

GNOME Platform Stormclouds

Posted Mar 25, 2004 12:51 UTC (Thu) by dcoutts (subscriber, #5387)
Parent article: GNOME Platform Stormclouds

An incremental approach would be to include language bindings into the GNOME development platform (this is beginning to happen) and then bless certian languages/platforms as ok to develop GNOME *applications* that can then be included in the official GNOME desktop. The point being that the GNOME libs would still have to be written in C to allow easy bindings for other languages.

That introduces the issue of only one-way reusability; apps in any language can use the base libs but an app in one language cannot reuse an app/component written in another language. For that we use a bonobo/DCOP/DBUS style component protocol.

That still leaves the problem that reusable libraries would not be able to be written in a high level language; that is libs with a more fine grained interface than high level 'components' (which only really work well if they have coarse interfaces). However that would probably be an acceptable tradeoff for the next few years, since the pressure for high level languages is really due to the pain of writing complex *apps* in C.

Besides, integrating different languages at a finegrained level is still an unsolved problem, the CLR doesn't even do it except for C#-like languages due to the semantic mismatch between different languages. It'll be interesting to see if parrot can do it ok for Python/Perl/Ruby.

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