GLib/GObject+C as the lingua franca? (was: kwallet and QCA)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 25 July 2008, nf2 wrote:
> Robert Knight wrote:
> >> For historic reasons KIO and
> >> KWallet landed in this "KDE desktop environment"
> >
> > Those 'historic reasons' presumably include the licensing issue that Qt
> > is GPL - which, as I understand it, would not be acceptable for gnome. 
> > If Nokia were prepared to re-license the non-GUI components of Qt (eg.
> > QtCore, QtNetwork) more permissively that might change.
>
> Even then i don't know if QtCore based libraries would work in-process
> outside Qt based applications. I guess you need to instantiate
> QCoreApplication for the event loop etc...

of course they would.

a) many of the classes in Qt don't use the event loop at all (collection 
classes, string class, etc)

b) by using the glib event loop, the rest is a non-issue

note that the use of the blig event loop was done specifically to address this 
issue because nobody else in this Mexican Standoff had the guts to do what was 
necessary.

for that reason alone, it's obvious, at least to me, that if you want to find 
the group that will get you furthest for project agnostic work, it's Qt. if we 
relied on other projects, we still wouldn't even have a share event loop. 
that's a massive indictment of non-Qt toolkits, imho.

> I wonder if a kind of mixed style would work: libraries with public
> GObject/C APIs, but internally stdc++. 

the phrase "disgustingly ugly" comes to mind.

> Staying with GObject/C for the
> API's probably makes sense for language bindings

as Richard already pointed out, this is  not true.

> (AFAIK lot's of them
> can be auto-generated), C is still the lowest common denominator,

a lowest common denominator, besides implying it's the least worst thing 
everyone can agree to, only matters if there is buy in from others. i honestly 
don't see that at this point.

> abstract interfaces can be modeled with GInterfaces easily (like GIO
> does a lot) ...

the same can be done with other frameworks. glib isn't magical in this regard.

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

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

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