Re: Sun de-emphasizes GNOME devel platform, supports KDE apps

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On Wednesday September 17 2003 00:08, Timothy R. Butler wrote:
>   I'm not saying that *I* am, afterall, I've been using KDE since right
> after 1.0 hit the streets... I'm just wondering about why there does
> seem to be a preference for GTK in development (what the topic was
> about).
I think this may be because GTK is natively C and KDE is natively C++ (yeah, 
there are bindings... but...).
And since there's a lot of people doing C programming instead of C++, they end 
up picking GTK, just because they're more confortable with C, or in a lot of 
cases because they doesn't know C++. I've heard someone saying 'if you're 
going to develop a GUI application use GTK because it is C and more people 
know C than C++ so you get more chances of being helped' which is very sad.
I think there's another root for that problem... I choosed GTK because I 
didn't know C++ once too... and I started to learn C++ when I saw how nice 
Qt/KDE was and I wanted to develop with it (the applications I end up using 
had an impact in my choice of language and toolkit).
Now, picking a random example, mplayer, it is developed in C, they wanted a 
GUI, so, they naturally picked GTK and they added a directory to the mplayer 
sources where the GUI is, there were little chances getting mplayer 
developers to develop a Qt/KDE gui... now, there's one well developed and 
maintained GTK gui and some diferent Qt/KDE guis to it that are distributed 
separatly and by that, fragmenting programing effors. And like that, there 
are a lot of more examples.
Maybe we should educate developers in OOP. Something that worries me is that 
there are lot of applications, little and big developed in C instead of C++ 
thus not being object oriented, that applications end up being monolotic 
applications that are compiled to a single binary file and that are very hard 
to re-use, some examples are mplayer, transcode, the cd burning applications 
and so on... applications that end up being called by GUI applications. And I 
think that C vs C++ is a big problem here because turning some part of a C++ 
application into a library is extremely easy, just take your class.cpp and 
class.h file, compile it separatly to libclass and link against it your 
application and that's it. It's not that easy with C which ends up being much 
more messy than C++, after all, OOP is here for something, isn't it ?
GTK/Gnome has still another point that people see in it that is about 
liscences... Qt was released as GPL long time ago, years ago, but we still 
has the remaining of that storm since GTK/Gnome is the GNU choice (The fact 
that Qt is commercial doesn't help with that, but I think it helps with QT's 
quality).
My two cents.
Thank you.
- -- 
Pupeno: [email protected]
http://www.pupeno.com
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