[Texmacs-dev] Re: Compiling TexMacs on OSX

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Henri Lesourd wrote:
> Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
>
> > Henri Lesourd wrote:
> >
> > > I want none of these alternatives, all these things
> > > look like it would bloat the software rather than
> > > helping.
> >
> >
> > These things could help you saving some time
>
> It looks like it will save you time, but in practice,
> the risk is spending much more time in managing the
> new dependencies it introduces.
>
> It's not clever at all to depend on Qt's XML parser,
> for as soon as you do this, you need the Qt lib
> installed on your target system *all the time*.

So? There's a high probability that this lib will be installed anyway on 
your system if you already make use of QtGui...

> That's definitely not what we want.

If we follow this reasoning, it is not worth using any helper library 
because it causes bloat... libc is even too much bloat, let's just go 
back to basics and program in assembler :-)

> > to concentrate on the word processor thing but that's not your 
> > business, I understand that now.
> Improving the word processor is a separated
> business, and the related code is completely
> independent from any toolkit.

Ahh... good!


> In fact, word processing has nothing to do
> with widgets, for everything occurs inside
> a specific widget (i.e. the "editor" widget),
> and the job of the editor is mainly reading
> keyboard and mouse, and drawing on the canvas.

Good (and logical too). So, AFAIU, one has everything in hand if he 
wants to create a Qt GUI directly on top of this "editor" (I mean 
without your glue library). That's good news indeed.

> If C++ were so good, people would use it to write OS
> code: it turns out that neither UNIX code, neither the
> windows kernel code is written in C++.

So??? A kernel has nothing to do with GUI programming. You want to be 
close to the hardware and be as fast a possible when doing kernel 
programming, you cannot beat C there, granted. A GUI is user bound and a 
user triggered action does not have to be fast on all operations. And 
when you want to be fast, you can unleash the power of C that is still 
available when you do C++. /me wonder why so many people uses C++...

You are doing a lot of generalisation here. And you know what? some 
people do kernel programming using C++. I did an in-kernel parallel port 
reading once in C++, I can't remember any problem. IIRC there's even 
some kernel that were entirely programmed in C++ (BeOS).

> In my opinion, there are well principled reasons to
> this, these people are not masochists, you know. It
> only turns out that C++ is not a sufficiently robust
> language, it is for example notorious that even
> very well written C++ programs tend to be fragile
> and hard to debug.

Sure, C-style pointers in spaghetti C-code is very easy to debug and is 
very robust too.


Abdel.