On Fri, Aug 08, 2014 at 10:06:28AM +0800, 黄羽众 wrote:
> Thank you for point out predecessors' question!
>
> I read the question and get some points, but I thinks the situtations change
> a lot and I am not ask the same question.
>
> 1. I am not ask for why GTK choose to implement in C, I know it have some
> historical reason. I want to make a proposal that gtk could be re-written
> with c++ just as GCC does. I want to discuss with you whether it is a good
> idea.
It's of course possible from an academic perspective, even though as a
lot of people have already said it would not be very practical. My
suggestion is that anyone who wants to go forward with this makes a fork
and works on it, with no expectations that it would ever be merged back.
Take the opportunity to break the ABI and make a new great GTK+ inspired
toolkit. If it's good then people will adopt it.
> 2. Situations change a lot. Back to the time GTK was born, C++ is also very
> primitive so the developers would rather implement an object-system by hand.
> But nowadays C++ is stable and have many cool features especially in C++11
> and the in-coming C++14. C++'s object-system is becoming more and more
> complete and add many useful features in GUI development such as exception,
> multi-threads and so on. I think due to the same reason did GCC turn to C++.
C is not updated as rapidly as C++ but it is modernized occasionally.
Support for multi threading is for example an optional part of C11.
This doesn't really matter too much for GTK+ though since it uses Glib.
> 3. Now, from the view of app developers, who are very likely learned
> C/C++/Java in classes, and learn Python/JS/PHP/Nodejs after class. And very
> probably have experiences coding with QT, HTML5, Android. They can't be more
> familiar with OOP and C++. But when they turn to GTK, they have to expand one
> line in C++ into three or more lines in C. This will threaten many
> developers. Although there are gtkmm available, but gtkmm didn't gain enough
> official support and recommend as GTK, and much fewer reference, help,
> support available. The official recommand is gtk in c rather than gtkmm in
> c++, so many devlopers read some tutorials and feel threatened and leave.
> What's worse, gtkmm didn't wrapper all of the gtk featurese. In some complex
> cases, developers have to use the low level gobj pointer to get things done.
If the impression that developers get is that they have to use C or that
they are strongly recommended to use C; then that sounds like a problem
with the documentation.
> Now is in 2014, It can't be more normal to develop GUI application with OOP
> style. I think it's time to change.
GTK+ is already object oriented, and good GTK+ applications are often
that as well even when they are written in C. You don't need support for
object orientation in the language in order to use object orientated
design.
> GTK could be rewritten in C++, and what's more important, GTK should
> officially recommend to develop apps in C++, which can't be more familiar to
> GUI developers.
The GTK+ project web site already says on its first page that while the
toolkit itself is written in C it also supports a wide range of other
languages. That's fairly official to me.
Marcus
[1] http://www.gtk.org/
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