Go (language)

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 11/23/2009 07:45 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Unfortunately a compiled language like C or C++ (or FORTRAN) is
> dependent upon the platform. The people that write the language
> standards don't generally go far enough to define environments.

My experience has been that often when you're doing non-trivial things,
interpreted languages are dependent on the platform too (try using Java
thread priorities on windows and linux).  Interpreted languages generally do
a better job of hiding the problem, but it's never mitigated completely
(unless some language is really willing to standardize on the lowest common
denominator for all platforms, which none ever will if they want to be taken
seriously).

> Unix/Linux, Windows, and Mac have very different graphical user
> interfaces. QT does a good job of standardizing things, but in contrast
> a JVM or PVM can be written once for each platform. Where in C/C++ David
> might want to use QT, I might want to use GTK, JABR might want to use
> OpenMotif.

QT and GTK were written once for each platform, and code that uses it only
has to be written once as well (it has to be compiled multiple times, but
that's a different job and different level of effort).  Unless you're making
the point that none of the above are a 'blessed standard' like Swing/AWT.
To that I would say that QT and GTK are defacto standards (for C++ and C
respectively, and you do treat C and C++ as different languages, don't you?
:-) ).  There was gtkmm (C++ wrapper for GTK), but it didn't get much use
even before QT went LGPL (to match GTK).  WxWindows is probably the
strongest competitor to QT in the C++ world, but a quick dependency search
of installed software on my machine tells me QT is used quite a bit more.

Don't get me wrong, having a blessed standard is good for a lot of reasons.
 I just don't think the C and C++ worlds are quite so hopelessly fragmented
as they're sometimes made out to be.

Matt