Re: [gtk-list] Re: Drag and Drop, try 1

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Fri, 13 Jun 1997, Martynas Kunigelis wrote:

> Note that most probably KDE will use a different protocol in a near 
> future, since Troll Tech promised to add Drand And Drop to Qt 1.3, 
> which is promised to be released "in summer". Hope the Trolls will
> choose a good protocol, they always do the right thing programmingwise.
> If only Qt was LGPL!
>
> It would be nice, however, if gtk would support DND to/from KDE, since

That would be nice.

Here's what I would like to do:
	Get talking with Troll Tech, the OffiX people (who seem to be
	rather lax in maintaining things), and you KDE people, along with
	the people on this list, and figure out what would be the ultimate
	drag and drop protocol. I can't find docs on Motif protocol, but I
	suspect it would be a very good place to start.

Then once we have agreed on a protocol, things will work much better.

> P.S. I don't want to start a flamewar, but has anybody asked why did
>      the autors choose C for gtk? I mean my heart hurts when I see
>      all the "C++ emulation" stuff. IMHO well written C++ code can be
>      as small/fast as C, and there's one BIG advantage that I see.

Maybe because C++ has a lot of shortcomings in many people's minds (and
reality) (not that I don't like C++, it has its uses), and also writing
gtk in C allows you to easily create bindings to other languages such as
python, perl, scheme, and last-but-not-least C++.

There are no bindings to other languages for Qt, to my knowledge, and a
quick search of TrollTech's web site seems to bear this out. 

Also, gcc's c++ front end is the only widespread C++ compiler in the free
software community, and it is not up to the quality of commercial
compilers like gcc's C front end is. 

>      Here it is: I bet that every gtk_*_new() call returns a pointer
>      to malloc()'ed GtkWidget, right? Widget structures are pretty
>      small, right? The heap fragmentation gets pretty big, also the
>      overhead of having a lot of small heap chunks appears. Damn, 
>      testgtk eats 2M on my Linux system, where any of the Qt demos
>      eat about 1M (I'm not subtracting the shared lib size, I know

testgtk exercises every widget available in gtk. Does an equivalent Qt app
exist that does the same?

'new' in C++ will do equiv of a malloc, I think.

(Looking at the shared library sizes, it does seem like gtk is larger -
libgtk.so.1.0.0 is 1.8M on the sparc, and that's not include libgdk or
libglib. Needs to be looked into.).

>      several apps would share it, but I'm taking a standalone app).
>      And with C++ you can easily create widgets on the stack or agregate
>      them into other classes. Allright, just don't start a flamewar,

You can get the same results in gtk, and as soon as bindings appear for
the other languages, you'll be able to do it in whatever language you
choose.

-- Elliot					http://www.redhat.com/
How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?
                -- Elliot, "E.T."