Re: New 'GObject' as base for GtkObject?

["Shawn T . Amundson" <amundson eventloop com>]

On Wed, Dec 22, 1999 at 11:20:27AM +0100, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> "Shawn T . Amundson" <amundson@eventloop.com> writes:
> 
> > After doing a good share of coding GUI stuff on BeOS (yes, after porting
> > GTK+ to BeOS I started coding in the native toolkit...), I can tell you
> > for certain that GTK+ is a hell of a lot nicer than some toolkits that
> > benefit from some more modern language features.
> 
> > [...] Writing applications in C with GTK+ is currently top-notch.
> 
> Wow. Now I'd *really* like to see these assertions supported with
> hard, technical data, pointer to code samples, and testimonies of
> other experienced developers.
> 
> I don't know BeOS, and have briefly tried Qt, so I'm open to the idea
> that you're right. But for now I find what you say extremely hard to
> believe.
> 

I guess I really was really vague on what I meant, so forgive me.

The problem with the BeOS toolkit is it's lack of layout management.
It's problems have nothing to do with language features.  Except that
things that should be public are sometimes private in the C++ classes,
making you write custom widgets to do simple things.  But still, that's
not C++'s fault, but the stupidity of the design.

Writing new widgets is really *really* easy for BeOS.  Of course, that's 
because you don't have to do any requisition or allocation code.  However, 
that simplicity requires you to have a huge amount of code at the application
level for laying out things properly.  And it's really easy to get lazy
and that results in fonts getting cut off and stuff so common in Java's AWT.

Like I just said in my previous mail, when I say that GTK+ is currently
top-notch, I mean as a C toolkit.  I really think you have to compare 
apples and apples, because oranges are completely different.  I have almost 
zero experience playing around with Gtk-- or any of the other bindings, 
so I wouldn't dare try compare GTK+'s C++ binding to BeOS or Qt (which I 
also haven't played with a lot).  I was just downplaying the significance 
of MI in a toolkit's overall quality - there are just so many other factors 
to consider as well.  (And no, I'm not saying anything bad about MI.)

-Shawn

--
Shawn T. Amundson                       amundson@eventloop.com	
Research and Development                http://www.eventloop.com/
EventLoop, Inc.                         http://www.snorfle.net/

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking