RFC: reference counted Throwable

Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sat Sep 20 23:42:32 PDT 2014


Am 21.09.2014 08:05, schrieb deadalnix:
> On Sunday, 21 September 2014 at 05:55:20 UTC, Cliff wrote:
>> .NET suffers a similar problem in spite of the community's best
>> efforts with Mono - it'll always be a distant 2nd (or 5th or 20th) on
>> other platforms.  And on Windows, C++ won't get supplanted by .NET
>> absent a sea-change in the mindset of the Windows OS group - which is
>> notoriously resistant to change (and they have a colossal existing
>> code base which isn't likely to benefit from the kind of inflection
>> point Apple had moving to a BSD and porting/rewriting scads of code.)
>>
>
> A bit OT: but Mono seems to be a popular platform for desktop
> application on linux. I have no idea why.

I think it may come from C++ hate that GNU/Linux enjoys, or at least it 
used to enjoy.

Back in the early days suggesting using C++ was an heresy, although 
corporate developers were slowly migrating to it in commercial UNIX 
settings.

So you got to do CORBA in C, OO in C (Gtk) and so on.

When I used to take part in gtkmm discussions  (early 2000), the usual C 
vs C++ discussions on GNOME mailing lists were quite common.

Qt and KDE were a no go for many, due to licesing issues.

So C++ usage was limited to those of us already into C++ that weren't 
that keen in using plain C. A minority,

Meanwhile, Microsoft released .NET and Miguel and others, which already 
had ported Microsoft technologies (Bonobo(COM), Evolution(Outlook)...) 
started Mono.

Given that they were also GNOME maintainers, there was this big 
discussion going on about GNOME becoming tainted with Mono.

To the point GNOME created Vala, which is basically C# that compiles to 
C and uses gobject as runtime system.

I used to be in the "we don't want .NET on GNU/Linux" side.

Nowadays I can only congratulate Miguel and the others that persisted 
against naysayers like myself. Specially given what happened with Oracle 
vs Google.

Which Xamarin and Microsoft took advantage of with the "Community 
license for open source".

Slowly, as the amount of users started to increase, I guess the 
GNU/Linux opinion about Mono, started to change.

So if you want to use a modern programming language, with bindings to
most common UI frameworks and ability to generate fast code, there 
aren't many other options.

Here I would say D could also fit the bill, but lacks visibility by the 
average GNU/Linux coder on the playground discussions.


This is just an opinion, maybe I am too far of the real reasons.

--
Paulo



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