Amarok Blog

Entries from Wednesday, September 6. 2006

Wednesday, September 6. 2006

Why do we keep on using C++? Posted by Mark Kretschmann in markey at 20:50

Comments (57)
Trackbacks (0)

Why do we keep on using C++?

Well, I don't know why you're doing it. I keep on using C++ because Amarok is written in it, which can't be changed easily. And that's about the only reason.

This morning I intended to review a code change in amarok.h, one of Amarok's central headers files. Accidentally, I pressed :w in vim, touching the file although it was not modified. The following build cycle left me ample time to shower, have breakfast, and write most of this blog entry! Just changing a single line in one of Amarok's C++ sources (heck, a single character), means a whopping 10 minutes of compiling and linking, until you actually get to see the result. Made a mistake? Oh well, fix it, and wait another 10 minutes. To summarize: Compiling is driving me nuts. I've wasted enough time for it in my life. Life's too short to wait for a freaking compiler.

Alas, there is no need for this madness. We have been given two wonderful tools, that present a true alternative for KDE application development. One is Ruby, given to us by Yukihiro Matsumoto, and the other is Korundum, by our very own Richard Dale. Using these tools, we can create applications and actually have fun doing it! Why bother with endless compile times, when we can have the same result in a much shorter time? Ruby is less performant than C++, but many programmers don't realize that this is utterly irrelevant for GUI applications, which spend 99% of their time in library calls, waiting for an event.

Two days ago I had this wonderful encounter with Gregor Karzelek in our new IRC channel #kde-ruby. He told me this:

"It is unbelievable how fast you can develop with ruby and how easy and fast you can create GUIs with korundum. i started a project for my brother a week ago and have done already about 80% of the functions and 90% of the gui. when i think how long it took my to create such things in java.."

"And for the speed: i don't know whether it really is that slower like so many say. i do think the gui of my project works quite fast. at least fast enough."

I think this speaks for itself. I, for one, don't plan to create another KDE application in C++. I have better tools now

Did this blog spark your interest? If so, join us in #kde-ruby to learn more about Ruby and Korundum.

Wednesday, September 6. 2006

Porting to Windows (part 2) Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 00:09

Porting to Windows (part 2)

A little while ago I wrote a small post explaining why Amarok was not going to be ported to windows for the time being.

At the Amarok HQ, we like to increase publicity by submitting our stories to digg and other news sites. Keeping track of the comments shows that there is plenty of discussion as to why we should or should not release a Windows port of the application.

Since writing that post over 12 months ago, the situation has become a little clearer and we understand the direction which will be taken. It has been discussed at length, both at our meeting and on IRC, that there should be a windows release at some point in the future. Amarok 2.0 will be based on Trolltech’s Qt4 framework, which provides the required GPL license under windows (which was previously unavailable). If a working kde-libs port exists, the release should nearly write itself.

In the case that kde-libs is not available under windows, it is also feasible to produce a Qt only version of the application, but would require a lot of work and risk our currently excellent status within the KDE community.

The only remaining factor would be a developer to do the job. Although the transition should be rather transparent, since Qt4 is platform independant, everybody knows that this is hardly ever the case. We don’t see this as too large a hurdle because there is plenty of support in the community and a high demand to get the job completed.

Estimated time of arrival? This is a question we cannot answer just yet, because 2.0 development has not yet started in full swing. We all hope that it can be released concurrently with Amarok for linux.

The reality of life is, that some of us do need to use Windows, and it would be great to be able to rock out with Amarok on that exotic, unknown platform.

For comments, please visit: the original post

« previous page (Page 1 of 1, totaling 2 entries) next page »
Frontpage