Wednesday, March 09, 2011

And now for some good news

With all the doom and gloom blog posts running around at the moment you may be forgetting all the awesome progress that is being made.  So I just wanted to shout out some things that are happening that I love:

GTK3

GTK+ has been cleaned up and it shows!  GTK is a great toolkit but it had been showing its age.  The tidying up (particularly removing the GDK stuff) has significantly reduced the learning curve.  And more improvements planned for GTK4!

GNOME Shell/Unity

The core user interface is being pulled from the 1990s to the future!  There are real risks and challenges here but it's progress in making GNOME the front-running interface it deserves to be.

GObject Introspection

No more out-of-date language bindings!  With introspection information GNOME developers have huge flexibility in picking languages and all languages are first class citizens.

Vala

A modern language for a modern desktop!  Languages like Java and C# offered a lot of promise, but never seemed to break into GNOME.  A modern language makes us more productive, attracts new experienced developers and gives us an opportunity to escape from the Albatross around our neck (C).

9 comments:

Seif said...

Thank you Robert for highlighting the good stuff happening in GNOME. People tend to only focus on bad things too much.

Anonymous said...

I can't wait to see a first draft for the new glib. I hope we get a few new fancy stuff like Iterator/List/Map-Interfaces, a generic marshaller and a couple of other interfaces high level people are used to.

Propaply also worth to add a more complete collection library like gee. But I'm sure that it is not going to happen.

I also hope we are going to use the planned mini-object for exceptions instead of our current approach.

Anonymous said...

Vala IS awesome. It takes all the goodness of GObject and lets it blossom into a beautiful, modern, high-level flower of awesomeness. Signals as language constructs, yay!

Too bad the Gnome project getting all the attention right now doesn't use it. Vala could use the visibility.

Anonymous said...

The introspection stuff is what interests me. Immediate access to new APIs in my favourite languages (Python and JS), without having to wait for binding packages to be updated and released.

Anonymous said...

valaaa!

You know that infinite monkey theorem?

Well, if anything, GNOME guys have a good chance of proving it wrong.

Seriously, vala?

Because it's an industry standard, I suppose?

Anonymous said...

Remember the times when people started to ignore the industry standard CORBA and replaced it with dbus?

Turns out that it wasn't that bad.

AhmedG. said...

What do you suppose is the best way to learn vala?

Amaury said...

Hey, man. Are you the one that packaged the vala ppa? I'd like to thank you, because it was very useful for Pysoy project, which I contribute to, and I'm pretty sure it helped many other projects that use vala. Thanks a lot. :)

A.T. said...

as if dbus had been ever anything good...