[Kde-bindings] Noob to qyoto

[James Mansion]

Hi,

I've been sadly avoiding Qt and Qyoto over licensing but now that its an 
LGPL playing field I'm getting interested. I don't normally do any GUI 
programming but one of my kids is showing an interest in writing some 
wargaming stuff and it really was very easy to pick up PyQt in lunchtime 
and build the basics of a hex map with him in the evening.  I've never 
been very keen on the moc thing as a C++ coder, but I guess that if it 
makes wrappers easier then its just great, and it was a blast putting 
together a simple GUI program on a new platform - haven't had so much 
fun since VB1 came out.

Anyway - its a lot easier to involve the lad on Windows, at least for 
the moment.  The kids get on OK with Ubuntu most of the time but we keep 
finding educational or gaming bits they'd like to access.

Professionally, my clients tend to use Windows desktops too - even if 
I'm paid to code on Solaris and Linux.  So: Qyoto looks very interesting 
to me, and I like the idea that I could package a minimal mono and 
Qt/Qyoto runtime with apps. I think this is superior to Java/Qt at the 
moment, if only because right now getting the JRE slimmed down is tricky.

It would, however, be a lot easier if I could use Microsoft's runtime as 
well, and that seems like it might be an issue.  When I commented on my 
joy that MonoDevelop is going cross-platform and keen-ness on mono/qt as 
a delivery platform (http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Sep-09.html), 
a comment to my comment saiid that:

 > Qyoto relies on mono's conservative garbage collector, and doesn't 
work with Microsoft's .NET.
 > It's also sparsely maintained as far as I've been able to tell, which 
is a shame.

Now the latter might be a matter of perception, and hopefully when Arno 
finishes his shiny new generator there will be a big splash on the KDE 
lists, and on the QT lists, and on the Mono lists etc.

But is the former currently accurate for Windows?  Will it remain the 
case in future?  It sounds like a bug and rather fragile given an intent 
to change the gc strategy in Mono (eventually).

James