Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3103 mails)

[Derek Fountain <derekfountain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I beg to differ. C is still a huge language, gtk, motif et al use C.
> Objective C I think is the language of choice on Apple platforms.
>
> Microsoft and KDE use c++, that's true.

This is straying from my point. The vast majority of the Windows applications 
people would like to see ported are developed with C++. There are no gtk or 
Motif apps on Windows, AFAIK. Asking a company to commence a port, and change 
the language just isn't on. Linux needs to sort out it's C++ problems before 
ports will happen.

> It can be done. Show me the (modern) platform that can't run the
> Netscape
> binary download, for example. OpenOffice.org? Opera? I'm sure it fails
> somewhere but by far the most can run them as is

They carry their own libraries with them for the most part. Netscape on my box 
takes 38MB of diskspace, loads extremely slowly and has a massive memory 
footprint. Openoffice takes 192MB of diskspace. The less said about it's 
performance the better. I don't have Opera, but I do have Acrobat - another 
25MB. You're not telling me this is the way forward are you? Ben said use 
statically linked apps, which is one step further towards madness. UNIX gave 
that up years ago.

My little webcam app (I was playing with v4l) is currently a 1.5MB executable, 
which is bad enough. Adding Qt into the package will add nearly 8MB more. 
It'll soon be a KDE app, so it gets a decent file dialog, the ability to 
insert itself into the system tray, proper printing support, kio support etc. 
I'm not sure which KDE libraries will be required, but kdecore, kdeprint, 
kdeui and kdenetwork will all be necessary. That's another 5 or 6MB. So my 
1.5MB application will take somewhere between 15 and 20MB if I try to bundle 
up all the libraries it requires to ship with it.

> C++ is currently not included in the LSB, that's all C as far as I can
> see.

And that's the problem. Until it's solved I can't see Adobe, Macromedia or any 
of the others taking desktop Linux seriously.

-- 
Microsoft Palladium: "Where the hell do you think YOU'RE going today?"