[gtkmm] future of gtkmm

[John Taber <jtaber qwest net>]

This thread seems to confuse several different issues:

1) future of gtkmm itself - with the exception of keeping up with latest gtk 
releases and adding documentation, the only real issue for the future is 
whether there is a strong enough developer base to continue all the excellent 
work should Murray ever lose interest.  

2) the future of Gtk - it's said that gtk is way behind Qt so catching up and 
surpassing Qt features is the first challenge.  The second challenge might be 
to develop more intelligent widgets such as validated input boxes and even a 
standard dialog box template that handles all the IO and okay/cancel/help 
actions, or even a opengl widget with scrollbars+zoom buttons, a really good 
UML template system, etc  - these type of intelligent widgets/templates could 
save lots and lots of coding time. It trades off a little flexibility (but 
with open source you can always modify things) but the productivity gains are 
huge.

3) the future of C++ - while most of the discussion centers on smart pointers 
and garbage collection, as head of a software company, I don't find memory 
mgmt to be that big a deal for us (though we could really use more 
intelligent debuggers, something like valgrind and lint on steriods) - For us 
the real issues are major gains in productivity and  profitabililty which are 
centered around needing better tools - like more intelligent UML, code 
generation, testing, and project mgmt metrics.  New functions, smart 
pointers, etc (ie D language) are all good but they are incremental 
improvements 

John