RE: [Evolution] evolution on windows

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 19:18 -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 08:51 +0800, Not Zed wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 09:02 +0100, Lehmann, Eckhard {TR-I~Penzberg}
> > wrote: 
> [snip]
> > Miguel has the wild idea that we're all going to throw all the code
> > away and rewrite it in c# anyway, providing a cross-platform port 'for
> > free'.  We could have done that for 2.0 perhaps, but mono was
> > definitely too green then (as far as i can tell), so we didn't.  The
> > idea excites me like a kick to the head really.
>
> You think that the C++ code base has a solid-enough design and
> implementation that a re-write isn't necessary?
Well, there's no C++ in it for starters, it is only C.  More or less 'ancient' ANSI-C at that too.

Actually its just "a hell of a lot of very boring work".  Mono gives us one big thing, cross platform, but then it doesn't help with all the fs and system specific things we need to do either.  Other than that, its basically just Java, or as Java is, basically just "C with objects", which saves a little bit of typing but doesn't really affect the basic building block algorithms at all, or even the object-level design very much.  Sure the objects are faster than gobject, but you don't use gobject for everything either.

And personally, I simply like C, I think in C.  I can't think in Java very well, so I (think I) write good C, and (generally) crap Java, and I write it faster since there aren't a billion changing 'class libraries' to learn - getting in the way of writing working code.  So unless I'm told otherwise i'm not going to push for any change myself because i'm a boring conservative old fuddy duddy who doesn't want it to change and will be difficult about it because I can be.

2.2's plugin stuff will allow mono plugins, but at present they wont have a lot of facilities to themselves without a lot of manual binding work.  That's at least a non-destructive incremental approach to the issue, but doesn't really help the overal portability of the application in any way in itself.

 Z

--

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> "Free Software, putting the Free back in Free Market." Novell's Evolution and Free Software Developer