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TrollTech to IPO?
burninginside writes "Yahoo is reporting that Trolltech, the world's biggest producer of Linux software for mobile devices, may be heading public. 'Sources close to the company' said the move may come as soon as 12 months but the official word is still that it 'is not in our immediate plans.'"
Fuck Slashdot.
They're tiny... A few hundred kilobytes of code? A couple of flashy cartoonish graphics? I'm amazed a company can base its entire self on this concept.
Does this mean that "-1 Troll" in the following comments is good? I'm so confused!
Trolltech's only product is C++, and their Qt libraries. Qt is only half the cake.. KDE is the other.. Trolltech got C++ as little assinine as possible, and turned it into something that "makes sense", however there is a whole lot that comes with KDE that isn't packaged in Qt.. how do you IPO KDE when it's free? Where is the cash?
As far as C++ goes, let me grab the opportunity to bitch about it. C++ and Qt C++ is comparable to java and dotnet in terms of bloat and raw speed. Why isn't everything written in java or dotnet? Cuz they suck! You can just feel the object oriented speed penalty in both kde and trolltech windows, compared gtk or win32 api c.
C++ is a nice idea for very complex designs, and it stays somewhat close to the bare metal, compared to higher level dotNet, Java, Basic, Pyhton and the other interpreted bunch, but not close enough compared to C. You neither get the superb speed and control over what the cpu does that you get with C, nor the ease of use and fluency that Basic provides. Object oriented people tend to come up with overly complex designs, and it's a source of endless nightmares and bugs. Even visual C++ is called C++, because it's capable of compiling and using C++, but most of windows is still C, the interfaces are C, and the C++ promise hasn't materialized. We're currently in an anti-Java frenzy by Microsoft who got scared of college professors liking the abstract concepts that Java provides, and universities basically becoming java-programmer tradeschools, so in fear of this Microsoft released their own java-monstrosity, labeled dotNet. But they dare not eat their own dogfood, their own cake. You could argue and operating system will always stay assembler/C mix, but on the application front, neither Internet Explorer, nor MSOffice is written in dotnet. We'll just end up in a world where MSOffice and IE are rewritten in dotnet, for the sake of intellectual property, and watch them lose their flare, their speed, their pizzazz. As far as C++ goes, at least Trolltech made the best of it that was possible, even if you can still feel the speed penalties in KDE, but at least Trolltech made it easy on the programmers. Just because gtk is c, try looking at the monstrous gtk c api compared to a qt c++ source file. Elegance and simplicity in complex designs is very important. Still, citing http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm
OOP is the greatest boon for those who like to write bloated code. I am not saying that all OOP code is bloated. But, something or someone is encouraging the practice of taking the most amount of code to do the fewest things. Further, OOP has added new ways to write bloated code that procedural has a hard time competing with. Hypothetical example for adding two numbers:
NORMAL
print(a + b)
BLOATED
am = new math.ArithmeticManager()
opA = new math.Operand((float) a)
opB = new math.Operand((float) b)
am.addOperand(opA)
am.addOperand(opB)
am.operator = new math.operators.Addition()
am.executeMathOperation()
system.io.output.print(am.mathOperationResult())
I'd much rather see good old Basic as something to start learning programming in, and get fluent in, with a very clear way of how Basic gets first compiled to C instructions, that are very clean and human readable and optimizable, and then C to assembler instructions. Every programming package should come with a code analyzer. Just because C or C++ compile programs that run faster than say Python or Basic, it doesn't mean everything should be done in it. Instead, you should be able to put together your code in Basic, look at the speed analyzer highlighting you the slow code, pop and open up that code in the c translation, and optimize it there, with the Basic code turning color and letting you edit only the hand optimized C portion. Same with C to
Wrong... the Free Qt agreements aren't worth the paper they are written on. They are entirely reliant on the good will of Trolltech. People should remember that Trolltech control KDE -- most of the core developers for KDE work for Trolltech and the KDE project can't take a dump without consulting them. This doesn't even get into the issue of the full GPL being used for Qt (and selling commercial licenses for those who do not want to be subject to it), which makes Trolltech a kind gatekeeper and tolltaker for commercial access to the KDE desktop.
I want to see a 5, Troll. It'd be cool, and sort of on-topic. I know it's possible, and I can take the karma hit. Wouldn't it be cool?