I’ve been doing some gtk coding lately, and because I don’t/can’t do C, I have been trying various options to use OO language with Gtk.
Professionally I’m a windows developer with along history of C++,java and C# work, however I have also been a linux user at home for the last 15 years or so.
Anyway I have tried gtksharp and gtkmm finally settling on using gtkmm and sometimes just using Gtk straight from c++.
However not being as proficient with C++ as I used to be, I found using gtksharp the easiest, but also the suckiest and after updating to 11.2 I noticed that Vala is now included and I was wondering if anyone had any experience and opinions on Vala?
>
> I’ve been doing some gtk coding lately, and because I don’t/can’t do C,
> I have been trying various options to use OO language with Gtk.
>
> Professionally I’m a windows developer with along history of C++,java
> and C# work, however I have also been a linux user at home for the last
> 15 years or so.
>
> Anyway I have tried gtksharp and gtkmm finally settling on using gtkmm
> and sometimes just using Gtk straight from c++.
>
> However not being as proficient with C++ as I used to be, I found using
> gtksharp the easiest, but also the suckiest and after updating to 11.2 I
> noticed that Vala is now included and I was wondering if anyone had any
> experience and opinions on Vala?
>
>
This is not an answer to your question (I have no knowledge about vala
despite its name), just a question out of curiosity.
Since you mentioned C#, you did try C# on linux with the gtk# bindings, what
was your experience with it?
If you find my question too off topic for your thread please ignore it.
I don’t have any experience with Vala, but I first heard of it when Barry Kauler was playing with it for Puppy. It looks similar to languages like Java but with the major difference that it generates C code and thus doesn’t not need a runtime interpreter or binding library as it can use the native C libraries. And you would get native C efficiency. That would make things easier for people who want to write GTK apps. Why not have a play with it and form your own opinions?
See my comment about the Gtk# ( gtksharp) "I found using gtksharp the easiest, but also the suckiest "
I said this because though easy to use, if you compare the efficiency of code execution it falls signifigantly behind the other options.
> See my comment about the Gtk# ( gtksharp) "I found using gtksharp the
> easiest, but also the suckiest "
> I said this because though easy to use, if you compare the efficiency
> of code execution it falls signifigantly behind the other options.
>
Thank you, that was the info the missed in the original post. I did no
experiments with it (gtk#), but I am surprised that performance is bad, I
would have expected that mono is better these days when it comes to
performance. Sad to hear that.
I would highly recommend doing a small test case before doing a serious project. In my limited experience, the difficulty with GTK+ in C is not the writing, which is fairly straightforward if somewhat tedious, but in the debugging. While I would see how using another language that compiles into C would make an application easier to write, I would think it would compound the debugging issues.
That is just a guess, I had never heard of Vala, and now that I have I most certainly will try it at some point, because I do not know of an entirely satisfactory way to write a GTK+ GUI for a C program.
But while this has not been mentioned, of course using Glade significantly reduces the difficulty in writing a GUI for GTK+ in C, and presumably other languages as well.