Re: new users and new contributions [LWN.net]

Re: new users and new contributions

Posted Apr 22, 2015 1:21 UTC (Wed) by ldo (guest, #40946)
In reply to: Ardour 4.0 released by rsidd
Parent article: Ardour 4.0 released

Porting to Windows may bring in more users, but don’t expect it to grow the actual community. Windows users seem more accustomed to receiving than contributing, being more passive than active. When you see the difficulties in developing open-source, cross-platform software on Windows, you can’t blame them.

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Re: new users and new contributions

Posted Apr 22, 2015 1:26 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (guest, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, true, but Android has solved that problem by having a SDK for windows. Maybe we need a linux-compatible SDK for windows that can be used to develop cross-platform open-source applications... The infrastructure is probably there already (eclipse, gcc, gtk/qt, etc).

Re: new users and new contributions

Posted Apr 22, 2015 13:16 UTC (Wed) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

> The infrastructure is probably there already (eclipse, gcc, gtk/qt, etc).

FWIW, I recently developed a fairly non-trivial QT app that runs on both Windows (builds natively under MSVC) and Linux. Lots of tabs, buttons, sliders, etc and it included TCP/UDP/IP networking, threads, reading/writing files, etc.

I was very happy with QT - I didn't have any Windows specific stuff in the GUI (just the networking and a thin). It looked "native" on both platforms and performed well.

In my experience, 90% of the problem of developing for Windows is avoiding all the Windows specific types and functions. C/Posix has 90% of what you need and if you stick with that, your code is perfectly portable.

In the past, I've done some fairly complex apps under Java (using Swing) which was developed on Windows but ran mainly on Linux (and parts of it on Android as well) - it didn't run as smoothly of course, and it looked out-of-place on both platforms, but it was workable.

So yes, I think the infrastructure is most definitely there.