--On December 28, 2010 6:09:59 PM -0800 John Ralls <[email protected]>
wrote:
There are two drivers for reimplementation:
1. One of our goals for 2.6 is to enable multiple simultaneous access
to a dataset. In order to get there, large swaths of existing code
need to be rewritten to interact directly with the database backends
instead of sucking everything into memory when the program starts up
or the user switches datasets. That code is written partly in
ordinary C and partly in sort-of object oriented code using the Gnome
GObject library. I don't know if either you or Donald have ever
worked with GObject, but it's quite painful.
2. Gtk+-3.0 is supposed to be released next month. It removes a bunch
of libraries which have been deprecated for several years upon which
Gnucash at present depends. All code that depends on those libraries
needs to get rewritten or we're not going to be in a bunch of distros
by the end of 2011, possibly starting with Ubuntu 11.04 in May. Other
distros (chiefly Debian and Red Hat Enterprise) will probably not
update to Gtk+-3 for a couple more years, meaning that we're going to
have to either maintain a separate Gtk+-2.0 branch or switch to a
different GUI framework even if we accept leaving all the existing
installations on 2.4 (which Jeff Warnica advocated). Again,
everything Gtk+ touches is written in C with GObjects. It can be done
more easily in C++ or Python -- or, for all I know, Javascript --
thanks to gobject-introspection (assuming that it works as
advertised).
These are both good reasons to consider moving some of the code to C++.
If we're going to have to rewrite a bunch of stuff anyway, then do it
in a more structured language. No matter how you look at it, this is a
really big job for a volunteer project.
Mike
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