[RFC] GTK+ 3 Migration - Alpha-grade Patchset

[Christian Stimming]

Am Montag, 22. Februar 2016, 23:42:24 schrieb Geert Janssens:
> > The reason why I suggested Vala instead of C++/gtkmm is that Vala is a
> > 1:1 match to the GObject system, and while gtkmm code is certainly
> > easier to write that pure GTK+/C code, they aren't really a perfect
> > match.
> 
> That does make sense indeed. On the other hand the current objective is the
> slowly migrate away from the GObject system, replacing it with true C++ OO.
> 
> One important reason for that is portability to mobile platforms (think IOS,
> Android). Some time back it looked like glib/GObject was a major roadblock
> in that direction. I don't know whether it still is, but at the time that
> was one major driving factor to switch to C++. The future GUI toolkit will
> also be evaluated in that context.

I agree that porting from GObject to C++ is a step forward. However, by now I 
have my doubts whether that effort is actually well invested anymore. Geert, 
are you sure we said C++ would help in "portability to mobile platforms"? For 
an android app, it is useless to have "the engine" in C - one needs it in Java 
anyway, and that's why Ngewi wrote a re-implementation of our data structures 
in Java for his gnucash-on-android app. I don't think a plain C++(11) plus 
some boost dependencies would actually help anything when moving the app to a 
mobile OS. Instead, C++ just tries to make the further development of the 
desktop application somewhat more realistic. But there is just such a large 
amount of code...

Regards,

Christian