Re: What're these huge threads about, anyway?

[Raphael Bosshard <whistler bluewin ch>]

Evan Martin wrote:

> It seems to me that using anything but C for (1) will needlessly
> exclude a whole pile of languages.  Sure, in theory they could be
> ported to the CLR, but in practice many won't.  Additionally, people
> outside of the GNOME project will continue to write their libraries in C
> (see recent discussions about zeroconf libraries and neon/soup), so it
> seems that C underneath is inevitable.
>  
En contrair, mon ami! Using C for the plattform libraries makes it 
surprisingly easy to create bindings for other languages. Doing the same 
in C++ is much more painful. One reason is that dynamicly linking of 
libraries produced from different C-Compilers is no problem, whereas the 
same is almost impossible.
CLR has nothing to do with C, CLR is the Virtual Machine used for C#.

> As for (2), well, I see projects in a bunch of different languages
> already: C for most of GNOME, C# for Novell's contributions, Python for
> GNOME-blog, ...
>
> So I guess my question is: where is the argument?
>
>  
The problem is: Which language should GNOME officialy support for user 
level applications. Python is considered unstable (version conflicts), 
Java is not free and C# is an ideology-minefield.

Hope that helps,
Raphael