Message: 2 Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 10:42:21 -0500 From: Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> Subject: Re: [boost] GUI Library Proposal for a Proposal) To: boost@lists.boost.org, boost@lists.boost.org Message-ID: <6.0.3.0.2.20041108102747.0272bec0@mailhost.esva.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 07:38 PM 11/7/2004, George van den Driessche wrote: [snip]

...

So what do you stand to gain, other than being able to write GUIs in your favourite language, as opposed to your second-favourite language? The only thing I can think of is that you don't have to worry about any bridge between languages.

What you say makes a lot of sense if just you is involved. Or perhaps a small enough group that they can all agree on the second-favorite language.

But in larger organizations that approach results in a proliferation of languages. I know of a company that has let programmers write code in any language they like. The result is a nightmare. Over a dozen languages are in common use. The toolchains on some projects are so convoluted that the projects cannot be moved between the several operating systems in use at the company. Programmers cannot freely move to another project because they often don't know all the languages that are required. It is a serious mess.

Thus the use of C++ as a GUI language may be sub-optimal as far as the small picture goes, but could be a really smart move in terms of the big picture.

That's a convincing point. I'm glad it's a convincing point, because I like C++ :) Only, sometimes I wonder whether we're all so obsessed with the language that we can't stand back and realise that some other language is appropriate for a given task. Makes me think: if there was some language that easily spanned the range from static to dynamic code, then everyone could learn that and that only. Never mind...

Because what we are talking about is a library, rather than something in the core language, non-users of the library don't pay for something they don't use. As long as a C++ GUI library is useful to a significant number of people it doesn't matter if lots of others choose a dual language approach.

True. Personally, I quite like the thinking behind Win32GUI, and I've been wondering about the viability of porting it to run on top of Carbon on OSX. I just needed a bit of persuasion that it's worth pursuing at all. I'm not sure how far the event handling systems can be aligned, but I'm certainly going to look into it. If it works, it'll need a different name :) George