Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 06:41, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 22:05 -0700, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> 
> > I think its about time we seriously considered promoting other languages
> > to first class status, along beside C. We need C for speed in core GTK+
> > libraries, but as computers become faster, human time becomes more
> > important than computer time, and high level languages vastly improve
> > programmer productivity, as well as encourage new developers.
> 
> The productivity improvement claim is a truism I am not sure is really
> true as a generic rule. It might be true for putting together
> small/mid-size frontend application, but I am not sure how true it
> really is for many libraries. A good example from librsvg is that Caleb
> spent two long evenings recently on a patch which ended up being about
> 15 lines. The time consuming part was naturally not typing in the lines
> of code, but doing the necessary calculations for the code. I think you
> will find a lot of similar examples going through the gnome.org code.
> 
> I am not saying we shouldn't offer people the use of more high-level
> languages, just that I am not sure we should fire up under the 'using C
> is slow' truism which such vigor.
> 

I think its pretty safe to say that C is not RAD and the need for Linux
RAD tools goes without saying.

I'm 100% for Ryan's idea but there has to be an understanding that core
libs and core functionality must remain in C for portability - I dont
want to see unmanaged code being forced to use Corba or some other IPC
mechanism just to access essential libs in managed code. This is exactly
what MS is doing with Longhorn to "persuade" all the developers to use
.Net 

Jamie.



> Christian
> 
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