Re: layers of abstraction, and how GNOME can win

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Andy Tai <atai ece ucsd edu> writes:
> To do what Mr. Behlendorf suggested, GNOME needs to have attractive API, and to
> the majority of GUI developers out there this often means C++ API, powerful C++
> library that provides native access to GNOME foundations like gtk+, Bonobo,
> Orbit, gnome-libs, etc.  Today there is just one (?) person working on gnome--,
> and no one is working on Inti.  (Other C++ APIs for gtk+ do not support GNOME).
> 
> The lack of mature C++ API is a negative factor for GNOME to gain mindshare
> when invading Win32 land.  Imagine the Windows programmers out there using
> MFC.  It is very difficult to them to go back to program in C with Win32 APIs,
> or the GNOME C APIs for that matter. GNOME needs to satisfy the needs of C++
> people in order to compete with the Microsoft platform. 
> 

(As an aside, Inti isn't dead, it's just that I consider GTK 2 and Inti
to be tightly bound and since I'm responsible for working on both it
makes sense to first finish up the C API then finish wrapping it, so
I'm working on GTK at the moment.)

A C++ API is important, but I would say that an IDE is more
important. The win32 API really isn't that nice, but it's easy to use
because of the documentation and Visual Studio hand-holding.

Also, we shouldn't forget that VB is the most popular client-side GUI
language.

Havoc