Re: Plans for 2.8 - GNOME Managed Language Services?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 00:05, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> 
> With the refusal of Sun to open up Java, that pretty much excludes it
> from consideration as the base of implementing VM+obj system.

Slow down - they haven't open sourced their implementation. We have
piles of free Java VMs, though.

>  That
> leaves only three options:
> 
> 1. Make our own solution - perfect except for the *huge* amount of work
> this option represents.

i.e. basically impossible.

> 
> 2. Parrot VM+Object system - possibly not fast enough for statically
> type languages

Unfinished and kind of a research project.

> 
> 3. mono CLR+CLI - everything we want, but invented by microsoft

Microsoft hasn't opened this yet either - and even if they had, you're
likely to get a fork if you try to put it in GNOME.

I would also argue that ECMA core _isn't_ everything we want - it lacks
a class library set, it doesn't tie in well with the server-side, we
don't have the "ecosystem" of third party tools, IDEs, libraries,
documentation, training, marketing, and support that you get with the
Java or .NET platforms.
(Note that with '.NET platform' I include things outside the ECMA core,
because you need the full platform not just language to get this
"ecosystem")

There are no good options, I grant you. But these three have showstopper
issues at present.

My suggestion if we want to do something in 2.8 and we can't get people
behind "open source Java subset" is:
 - make full introspection data on the GTK+ API more formally part of 
   GTK+, so language bindings aren't maintaining this themselves
 - allow parts of GNOME in PyGTK+

Gets us some of the development efficiency advantages. It's not really a
long-term answer to the larger concerns, but it's useful for now.

Havoc