Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Martin,

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 04:48, Martin Sevior wrote:
> A word processor and a presentation program. 

	Building good infrastructure is really important for code reuse, code
re-use can result in fewer bugs, a more coherent platform, far less
duplication of effort etc.

	Mono will allow lots more code re-use, and cross language code re-use
which with luck will help us integrate the various open source projects
into a utopian mega development project :-) ok ok, anyway whatever
happens it is well worth investing in shared infrastructure, and the
thing that worries me most about the AbiWord team is my perception that
they refuse to sensibly re-use / depend on the hard work other people
have done to make their life easy [1] instead consuming time and
creating complexity by abstracting it all. [2]

	Oh - and there's the human interest aspect, the Mono developers are
really having a lot of fun and are hyper-kinetic-Miguel-motivated
hackers, they have achieved a staggering amount in a short time, and
they love the task at hand and that means a lot.

	I was a little blown away to see Dietmar's work on monoburg which
compiles a YACC like language into a fast jit eg. :-) [ reportedly
faster than Kaffe already ].

> In any case we at AbiWord will keep on coding in whatever time we
> can snatch.

	Great :-) you guys are doing some wonderful work, it seems despite the
limitations you impose on yourselves ;-) each to his own.

	Regards,

		Michael.

[1] - even when that code could easily be ported to platform FooBarBaz.
[2] - NB. of course, not necessarily true, but my perception, eg.
	+ "It doesn't print to PDF" feature request which should really be
	+ "It doesn't use gnome-print on every platform, and so someone gets to
re-invent chunks of gnome-print in AbiWord which hasn't been done yet"
	And yes - I know not all AbiWord developers think / want this, but it
seems to be the consensus, that some loss of service on QNX is
unacceptable, and that re-writing inside AbiWord is better than porting
outside AbiWord.
	Hopefully the far superior portability of Gtk+2.0 / Gnome 2.0 will
enable us to start fixing these issues at root.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot

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