Philip Van Hoof wrote: > On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 23:24 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote: > >>> And this is why GNOME should accept and go for higher programming >>> languages and modern development techniques. > >> I totally agree but wouldn't it be better to use native languages that >> offer all this like the D language (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/). > > I think most of the people that ever talked with me on IRC already know > that I'm very much a fan of the D programming language.
Great :) > >> No one has ever justified why we need a VM given all its disadvantages >> (speed - especially when mixing with native code, startup time, resource >> usage, bloat etc) > > A program that runs in a virtual machine can benefit from run-time > optimization. If you want to do the same with a native application, you > would need to feed the compiler with statistics which you need to gather > from your users. Which isn't always an easy task. > D *easily* beats mono and java in every benchmark so runtime optimisations count for very little here. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=dlang&lang2=csharp [snip] > Even for mobile devices. But you make a good point with D. I would love > to develop using D for the Nokia 770. In fact, I have plans to build > myself a cross GCC compiler with an ARM backend and a D frontend soon. > Great the more of us that use D in gnome the more likely it will get accepted at some future date. > And then ... fuck the convention that everything must be done in a > popular language to be accepted by some community. Then they don't > accept it. That's their problem. I believe Mono was rejected mostly by Sun Developers with concerns over bloat and memory usage being high on the list (and maybe a few political reasons). D does not have these issues and if a few of us Gnome developers start using it we may find we can get in Gnome one day :) > >> The D language offers the best of all worlds IMO *without* compromising >> on speed, resource usage or bloat. It would be madness to use a VM instead! > > There's still some pro VM arguments that D doesn't have. Like a good > reflection framework (Hibernate uses this a lot). > Why do we need reflection? If and when Gobject gets full introspection it will become irrelevant. Reflection does affect performance too which is why D avoided it and stuck to introspectable properties only. D has made sensible design choices by following Delphi's design instead of java/c#. > Oh .. And now that I mention Hibernate. The current popular languages > (Java and .NET) have A LOT frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, etc) that > don't (yet) exist in the D world. (there's NSpring and NHibernate Java > guys, you don't have to tell me I'm selling Java-only tech because you > would be lying). > > Most of them don't even have an equivalent in any of those "native" > languages. I assure you such frameworks DO speed up software devel- > opment. > > I would very much want GNOME application developers to start leveraging > such frameworks. We already have most of what we need in Gnome already for building cool desktop apps - we just need D bindings for the Gnome specific stuff. -- Mr Jamie McCracken http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/ _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
