Re: Would it be possible that gtk implementation in C++

[Marcus Karlsson <mk acc umu se>]

On Fri, Aug 08, 2014 at 10:06:28AM +0800, 黄羽众 wrote:
> Thank you for point out predecessors' question!
>
> I read the question and get some points, but I thinks the situtations change a lot and I am not ask the 
> same question.
>
> 1. I am not ask for why GTK choose to implement in C, I know it have some historical reason. I want to make 
> a proposal that gtk could be re-written with c++ just as GCC does. I want to discuss with you whether it is 
> a good idea.

It's of course possible from an academic perspective, even though as a
lot of people have already said it would not be very practical. My
suggestion is that anyone who wants to go forward with this makes a fork
and works on it, with no expectations that it would ever be merged back.
Take the opportunity to break the ABI and make a new great GTK+ inspired
toolkit. If it's good then people will adopt it.

> 2. Situations change a lot. Back to the time GTK was born, C++ is also very primitive so the developers 
> would rather implement an object-system by hand. But nowadays C++ is stable and have many cool features 
> especially in C++11 and the in-coming C++14. C++'s object-system is becoming more and more complete and add 
> many useful features in GUI development such as exception, multi-threads and so on. I think due to the same 
> reason did GCC turn to C++.

C is not updated as rapidly as C++ but it is modernized occasionally.
Support for multi threading is for example an optional part of C11.
This doesn't really matter too much for GTK+ though since it uses Glib.

> 3. Now, from the view of app developers, who are very likely learned C/C++/Java in classes, and learn 
> Python/JS/PHP/Nodejs after class. And very probably have experiences coding with QT, HTML5, Android. They 
> can't be more familiar with OOP and C++. But when they turn to GTK, they have to expand one line in C++ 
> into three or more lines in C. This will threaten many developers. Although there are gtkmm available, but 
> gtkmm didn't gain enough official support and recommend as GTK, and much fewer reference, help, support 
> available. The official recommand is gtk in c rather than gtkmm in c++, so many devlopers read some 
> tutorials and feel threatened and leave. What's worse, gtkmm didn't wrapper all of the gtk featurese. In 
> some complex cases, developers have to use the low level gobj pointer to get things done.

If the impression that developers get is that they have to use C or that
they are strongly recommended to use C; then that sounds like a problem
with the documentation.

> Now is in 2014, It can't be more normal to develop GUI application with OOP style. I think it's time to 
> change.

GTK+ is already object oriented, and good GTK+ applications are often
that as well even when they are written in C. You don't need support for
object orientation in the language in order to use object orientated
design.

> GTK could be rewritten in C++, and what's more important, GTK should officially recommend to develop apps 
> in C++, which can't be more familiar to GUI developers.

The GTK+ project web site already says on its first page that while the
toolkit itself is written in C it also supports a wide range of other
languages. That's fairly official to me.

                Marcus

[1] http://www.gtk.org/