Re: [Vala] Port Tomboy?

[Jiří Zárevúcky <zarevucky jiri gmail com>]

2009/6/27 Andrea Bolognani <eof kiyuko org>:
> What is the current state of interaction between Vala and Mono? I mean,
> would it be possible to take a useful Mono library, rewrite it in Vala,
> and make the Mono programs pretty much transparently use the rewrite
> instead of the original library?

There are tools to automatically create a managed wrapper for
GObject-based library, so yes, it would be possible. Although I'm not
sure how eager would Mono programmers be to use such wrapped version.
Wrapped native code is generally slower and more difficult to work
with then a pure CIL implementation. The library in question would be
more likely to exist in two separately maintained versions.

> If that is the case, I'd call such a rewrite a gain for the GNOME platform
> as a whole, since it would make a previously Mono-only library available to
> all the languages in the platform.

Yes. I agree with that.

> Porting a whole application just for the sake of it is hardly a justifiable
> effort; it may make sense to do so if there are other benefits, like better
> performance or smaller memory footprint, which I believe Vala could give.
> Everything else is just propaganda.

I somewhat agree with you, but such decisions must be left to the
application's developers themselves. Even though the software is free,
we must have some decency, don't we?