On 09/09/13 10:29, Russel Winder wrote:
It also appears that Microsoft are beginning to think the whole CLR
thing is on it's last legs.
The whole "all non-Windows users have to hate C#" thing has some basis
in fact but also had a lot of FUD associated with it. The "Mono hatred"
stemmed from that. So will Microsoft go after Mono with patent suits if
they are not themselves using C# and CLR? They possibly might as an
income stream, but it is unlikely to be profitable and so may be not.
I think the Mono hatred/fear stemmed from a particular time in Linux history
which involved a combination of Novell's role as a major driver of Mono in
GNOME, Microsoft's very aggressive patent posturing (although no actual
lawsuits), and the close relationship between Novell and Microsoft that
culminated in their patent agreement.
I don't think Microsoft would ever bother suing over Mono patents just for money
-- the concern was always that Novell's pushing of Mono was a Trojan Horse that
would enable Microsoft to take down the wider Linux community and Novell to
clean up on the business Linux side.
Without solid support from Microsoft the C#F#/CLR culture is unlikely to
remain strong, despite the serious success F# has had in making people
interested in CLR. And C# is not a bad language, in many ways much
better than Java. But Java has staying power in ways C#/F# do not.
First-mover advantage, cross-platform for longer, less patent fear ...
I gave Mono-D a whirl, but as I don't do any C# or F#, it has brought in
a huge amount of dependencies. My problem is I do not understand how the
"Solution" system is the same or different to everyone else's "Project"
system. I guess I do not have much enthusiasm to find out as I can just
use Emacs.
Yes, the number of dependencies is very, very annoying if you don't want to work
with C#/F#.
GNOME vs. Qt may be religious to certain parties, but most people choose
either GNOME or KDE for the desktop and then load the other widget set
as well. I use GNOME but I have a many Qt-based things on here and
indeed develop PySide and PyQt5 based systems since GNOME is a
non-starter on Windows and OS X. Pragmatism is the order of the day here
not religious fervour.
Yes, GNOME vs. KDE is the issue, not GTK vs Qt. Installing a specifically GNOME
or KDE app will pull in a ton of dependencies from the other desktop, installing
a purely Qt- or GTK-based app is much less heavy (it's almost unavoidable I'd
say to have both Qt- and GTK-based code on your system).
I found this out recently when trying to install kcachegrind, which wanted to
pull in a ton of stuff from the KDE desktop that really didn't seem necessary.
It does apparently include a "qcachegrind" package that's purely Qt-based, but
it's not packaged separately for Debian or Ubuntu :-(
I think that now that Qt has escaped from
Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HNokia, it will return to being one of the two
primary system for cross-platform GUI systems, wxWidgets being the
other. Thus I think QtD (fot Qt4 and Qt5) should be seen as an essential
component of the D milieu. wxD should also get some presence. It is
great we have GtkD, but I cannot see it ever having any cross-platform
traction.
I think that move is already happening and has been for some time -- in fact I
think the resurgence of Qt has been happening ever since it was LGPL'd. My
impression is that GTK/GNOME won out historically because the Qt GPL/commercial
dual licence meant that there were licensing compatibility issues even for free
software, and that there was a single commercial gatekeeper for proprietary
software. That was an undesirable situation to have for the core graphical
toolkit of an operating system, so GTK was preferred.
I completely agree that QtD should be a priority project -- I think Qt's
importance is only going to grow.
Perhaps this is a nice point to re-iterate my earlier plea for consideration of
Qt Creator as a potential cross-platform D IDE? :-)
