Re: gnews-hows it going?

[Tuomas Lukka <lukka fas harvard edu>]

> I don't think the majority of my target users will want to modify the
> UI at all, 

If you are sure about that, certainly. 

> so I don't think the benefits of dynamic UI (flexibility)
> outweight the downsides (less mature codebase, slower, fatter, fewer
> compile-time checks).

Your points are valid but I think not as serious as you make them sound.
Let me address them here.

Less mature codebase I grant you wholeheartedly. That's why I find
this particularly exciting - it's something new, the whole style of
declarative user interface with some procedural code interleaved, using
a standard data exchange format (XML). 
At least I haven't seen that done anywhere before (I'd appreciate links
or references if someone knows of something like this).

As for speed, I have yet to notice any significant difference between
these apps and C apps except the slightest at startup, because I print
out a lot of messages and do things rather inefficiently still (see point
one above).  I know there must be some difference at run-time but it's not 
noticeable.

As for fatter, I think that the ability to run several apps in the same
process will cover for that - you don't need a different perl process
for each application.

Fewer compile-time checks - true. But I also get fewer core dumps due
to more run-time checks (I know gtk checks for types but it's easy to
core in C in other ways).

Once the system is really up to speed, I'm planning to rewrite a couple
of gnome apps as demonstrations of the productivity. Unless someone
has some apps they really need in which case I might use those as
benchmark cases here.

	Tuomas