On 28/05/2013, at 5:23 AM, Gour wrote:
>
> 15 years? That's a lot.
>
> How is it that the language, afaict, haven't caught more users?
I am not a marketer. Any language requires a core support team to
have a chance of snowballing. And good docs. Languages like
Rust do well because it is supported by Mozilla devs. Go did well
because it is supported by Google. Java did well because Sun paid
a couple of million to develop it and a billion to market it :-)
Ocaml is supported by France. Haskell started as an academic
language and there are enough academics around for a pool
of devs to form.
If anything .. I'm a negative influence .. tendancy to rant may
be noticed :->
> Any rough estimation about the userbase and are you the only core dev?
I'm the core dev. I'm the userbase as well.
However its my "life work" so I do a lot of work on it.
Others contribute occasionally as they feel inclined.
Mike Maul has done a couple of major things recently (a Wiki and
the package manager). Shayne Fletcher helped get it working
again on Windows. And further back in time Erick Tryzelaar
wrote the fbuild and did some work on the compiler.
>> Felix can bind to C and C++ libraries. Executable glue logic is
>> usually not required, however you DO have to provide "type glue".
>
> I see.
For example:
type double = "double";
fun sin: double -> double = "sin($1)"
requires '#include <cmath>'
;
binds C++ double to Felix double and C++ sin to Felix sin.
[Of course these are already in the library .. just an example so
you can actually *see* the code]
>> I am not going to write a Qt binding, or a binding for ANY large
>> library. However I will support any such effort, modifying the
>> compiler if required to ensure it can be done relatively easily.
>
> Are there *any* GUI bindings available for Felix?
Nope. Gui's are too big. It requires a full time effort to write
maintain and test them. I think Mike Maul did a partial
binding of X Windows and an X windows manager.
I did a fairly complete SDL binding, however I have dropped
it because again, its big enough to need a dedicated developer.
>
> When it comes to C++, there are several choices like {qt, wx, fox, fltk...}
> while the C world practically offers only gtk+ & EFL.
>
> What would you do for GUI & Felix?
I personally think all that all desktop GUI's are out of date now.
The way forward is to write applications as servers and use a browser
as a GUI: HTML+javascript on the client side and Felix on the server side.
You can see the current *heavy* move in this direction:
* Chrome book
* Firefox OS
Particularly with the demise of Windows due to MS releasing Windows 8
disaster and failing to jump on the mobile market.
>
> I hope that web & HTML5 is not the future of desktop apps...
I suspect it is. Its a horrible platform, http was never designed for this.
AJAX is a total hack. But the platform has a couple of advantages,
including a fairly good way of doing layout that adapts to screen size,
Javascript has one BIG plus: it has real closures, and, the web has one
killer advantage: reusable libraries are available by just whacking a
URL in the <header> section (eg JQuery, etc etc).
> Uhh...it is a recent change?
No, flxcc was dropped ages ago. It was too hard to maintain
with limited resources. the problems include disentangling macros
from code, and figuring out which typedefs represent abstract types
and which are really aliases. Enums have multiple uses. Etc.
And this is just C. For C++ its impossible. No one can even get
a C++ parser to work right, so how can you write analysis tools?
[clang 3.3 doesn't parse it correctly yet. Not sure if gcc finally
works. I doubt the parses are easy to disentangle from the compilers
so you can write things like automatic binding generators]
> Does it mean one has to do it manually now?
Yes. Of course you can write scripts to help.
> It also means that if we eliminate languages like Cobra/Haxe...it looks that
> the
> Ada is giving us the most having decent compiler, fair size of community and
> maintained GUI bindings...
The obvious solution is to just bite the bullet and stick to C++ :)
This actually makes Felix very attractive. You do not need to "do everything
in Felix". You can mix and match. You can download and build it and use it
to do little jobs or provide some libraries, write much of your high level
libraries in C++, and then glue things together with Felix.
With this kind of methodology, you can learn Felix slowly, avoid the
advanced and more experimental bits, and so have a reasonably
stable set of code. There is a cost to this: Felix pays a price not
being able to do everything "the best way" because it has to provide
the seamless transition to and from C++. But the "migration path" factor
is also (supposed to be) a big advantage.
--
john skaller
skal...@users.sourceforge.net
http://felix-lang.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt
New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service
that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your
browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic
and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may
_______________________________________________
Felix-language mailing list
Felix-language@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
