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KDE Developer Sirtaj Singh Kang Interviewed

Posted by timothy on from the level-headed dept.

highwaytohell writes "Sirtaj Singh Kang is a KDE developer and an official spokesman for KDE in Australia. In this interview conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald he talks about how the KDE project manages to maintain its hierarchy, where he sees KDE in the future, Linux portability issues and the relationship between Trolltech and KDE developers. The article gives a good insight into how maintainers and developers work to maintain one of the more popular window managers for Linux. Certainly worth a read."

3 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My gripe with KDE (& Gnome) by mao+che+minh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, KDE 3 with a variety of kernels runs great on my P3 600mhz, 256mB of RAM, and crap video card. This is even when I am performing tests and running Apache (with a ton of mods) and mySQL. I have tried Windows XP on this get up. It wasn't pretty. I think that KDE 3.x.x running over Linux kernel 2.4.18 is the fastest GUI that I have come across.

  2. C++ templates and Qt compile speed by truth_revealed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'v been using Qt since 1996, and I think it is the best written set of GUI classes out there. I also think C++ is the best compromise between performance and abstraction for graphical user interfaces. That does not mean there aren't some problems, however...

    Does anyone else think that Qt should forward declare more classes than it does? The compilation time of Qt projects has went up five fold since Qt 1.x due to excessive of C++ templates. Sure there are ways to cope with it: distcc, ccache - but this is not addressing the primary problem - C++ compiles are too bloody slow and getting slower all the time.

    On another topic, who else thinks C++0x should make provisions to forward declare templatized class instances? Including all these template definitions in every header file is complete death for compilation time: #include <string>, for example. Precompiled headers help a little, but are easily corrupted and the cause of many bad builds.

    1. Re:C++ templates and Qt compile speed by truth_revealed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ...and it does not look like gcc will support the C++ 'export' functionality for a long long time, unfortunately. It would require a complete redesign of the link system to make it smarter. The C++ compiler would also have to defer code generation for all code referencing the exported templates by value to the link phase because it would not necessarily know the size of classes/structs until link time. I agree this 'export' would be good, but I don't see widespread support for it in the next ten years (from GCC, at least). It changes all the assumptions that C++ compilers have made in the last 10 years.