KDE Adopting Mono

leandrod writes "The Register reports that members of KDE are committing to use and support mono, Ximian's independent .Net implementation. Not only does this provide KDE with some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt, it also spells well for cross-desktop application and even KDE-Gnome desktop integration, because mono is developed by Gnome's most prominent ISV, Ximian, and is intended for Gnome integration." Update: 09/12 14:22 GMT by T : Actually, the Register story overstates things a bit, it seems. According to KDE developer Hetz Ben Hamo (heunique), "Yes, you can use QT# to write QT/KDE apps, but it doesn't mean that KDE will support mono. you can use kernel 2.4, but you can use any linux kernel or any other unix based OS." See also this comment from David Faure for more insight.

Comments

Using multiple languages with the Mono framework

[Carl]

Hi,

Is there a good example why/how something like Mono/DotGNU helps using libraries written in/used from other programming languages?

How does one for example mix and match a program written in C# which uses the iconv C library and the Qt C++ library while using the Guile library to give the user a scheme scripting extension to the program.

I looked at the IK.VM.NET a DotNet Java implementation using GNU Classpath. You will see that there is a lot of work needed to make for example Java Exceptions work correctly with C# exceptions (Java exceptions are mostly checked, C# exceptions are never checked at compile time). And even simpler things as mixing the basic Sting classes or the IO library seem like it is non-trivial.

And C# and Java are really very much like each other. What about mixing more "exotic" languages like Logo and Scheme with Prolog or even basic C?

The DotNet runtime seems to support multiple language on top of it but it is not clear how that helps adapting libraries to multiple languages. It seems to me that you still have to write wrappers around every library to make it work with the way for example Strings, Dictonaries or other standard datastructures are represented/used in the different languages. It seems to me that mixing multiple languages will always be a challenge when programming.

multilingual programmability what ?

[InodoroPereyra]

Not only does this provide KDE with some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt

You mean you are ignoring this ?. I just read David Faure's comment. Is it me or this article is a troll ???

A refutation

[Epeeist]

1. It is not patented
2. The trademark is controlled by a single company, the actual implementation is not
3. It may not be a standard, but all the specifications are published. To my mind this is much better than a partial submission to a standards body, without disclosure of what may or may not be patented, copyrighted or subject to law suits at a later date.
4. Initial releases of Swing were memory and CPU hogs. The current versions are much better

Re:Bad headline

[manyoso]

This is true. But as the article states we are working on DCOP bindings and the Kate plugin. When Qt# is in a solid state, we'll extend to include bindings for kdelib.

Re:WRONG

[dfaure]

1) IMHO it's the responsibility of a journalist to check for facts before "forwarding" a story. The lack of doing so is how so many wrong stories appear everywhere. It's just too easy: as soon as one person says nonsense somewhere, all "news" sites pick it up... That's not journalism, that's "spreading rumours".

It's especially frustrating for those who "know the truth", to see that we don't even have time to get the initial website corrected, all the other news sites make news out of it immediately.

2) The article on theRegister does not say "KDE is adopting mono" like the /. headline said. It felt like this was being said behind the lines, the the headline on /. is really amplifying this wrong 'fact'.