Move VisualD to github/d-programming-language ?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

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? :-)