Using scripting languages for KDE4 main modules

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 07 October 2006 9:06, Andras Mantia wrote:
> languages. For (a completely made up) example, I would oppose having
> the clock applet for kicker written in Ruby/Python, but I don't oppose

why? have you looked at styleclock? it is a c++ "shim" that loads kjs and 
renders clocks written in js. in fact the clock is, imho, a perfect example 
of something that would be better done with scripting as it confers greater 
flexibility at very little cost to great benefit to the user.

this is, btw, one of the reasons i advocate js over, say, python or ruby for 
these specific cases: the overhead is acceptable.

>  I think the basic desktop should work just fine without a need for a
> language interpreter. 

i don't think it's too much to ask for kjs or qsa. they are both lightweight 
and at least kjs is already in use on your desktop if you use konqi. it's not 
like the current clock written in c++ is exactly lightweight (it's one of the 
fattest and certainly the slowest of all the default applets, actually)

> Compiled code rulez. ;-) 

for libraries and certain support roles, you bet.

>  If we are talking about complete applications written in a script
> language, I'm fine with them, even shipped with KDE, if - again - they
> do not provide basic desktop functionality.

i do agree that it is good to keep the basic desktop as thin as possible. to 
prevent scope creep by the compiled language bigots, i'd suggest that a good 
definition of "basic desktop functionality" would be required to make this a 
useful metric. and that's not as easy as it might sound ;) 

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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