Re: GIO branch

On Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:35:56 +0100, Thomas Leonard wrote:

> I think I need to pick a new language first, though. Developing in C is
> just too painful, but Python does have rather a lot of overhead, and a
> lack of static type-checking. Haskell is way too slow, and probably not
> well suited to this kind of thing.
[snip]
> More suggestions welcome...

I'm prepared for the usual bout of derision, but I have been using 
Freepascal For lightweight things.  It has some good middle ground, being 
Object oriented and generally less painful than C, but not Dynamic and 
garbage collected.  The memory usage and speed are close enough to C to 
not really matter (C marginally faster, FPC marginally less memory).

The compiler is well supported, and speedy (most of the time goes on 
linking,  Which the next major release is hoping to fix with an internal 
ELF linker)

You can easily knock things out by using Lazarus, which is a behemoth. If 
you use their components a helloworld is fairly huge, I'm not sure if 
growth beyond that is as bad. I use MSEIDE which is much lighter but 
quirky, as projects that are largely the work of one person are wont to 
be.

I'm currently using Freepascal for a little educational programming thing 
on the OLPC XO.  Talking to X direct without anything beyond xlib. I'm 
quite pleased with how it's going (apart from the fact xlib blows goats 
of course)




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