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Comment by mixedCase | Hacker News Reader

Well, this spells bad news for Qt and by extension any non-Gtk Linux environment. I was really hoping there would be more traction behind it to get a better non-C++ dev story; but it seems we're stuck with developing for two separate Linux environments (and other OSes) instead of writing once and having a binary that looks native in every OS with just a few platform-specific stylesheets here and there instead of entirely separate UI codebases.

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I believe Gnome strongly encourages apps to be written in Vala (C#-alike with C support) now. [1]

The built-in official Gnome programming IDE ("Builder") seems to support "C, C++, Python, Vala, Rust and Ctags" too. [2]

Edit- A complete list of fully- and partially-supported languages for Gtk+ 3 is here: https://www.gtk.org/language-bindings.php

Edit 2- I was wrong about Vala! See comments below. :)

1. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala 2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Builder

Actually, quite the opposite, the GNOME folks have been moving away from it: https://www.bassi.io/articles/2017/02/13/on-vala/

I think the only Vala maintainer right now is from Elementary OS, where they use primarily Vala.

Interesting. Thanks for the link!

> I believe Gnome strongly encourages apps to be written in Vala (C#-alike with C support) now. [1]

No, some Gnome developers blame Vala for all their problems and want to rewrite everything in Rust :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Val...

Vala isn't in a good state today, it virtually has no maintainer. Gtk isn't in a good shape either. API keep changing, bugs are never fixed and maintainers seem to care very little about stability. Actually the whole GObject ecosystem is in a difficult situation.

IMHO, using Python is right now the only viable way to write Linux desktop apps without using C or C++ .

> The built-in official Gnome programming IDE ("Builder") seems to support "C, C++, Python, Vala, Rust and Ctags" too. [2]

Gnome Builder isn't financed by the Gnome Foundation AFAIK.

Last week there was a "Rust + Gnome hackfest" in Mexico City, attended by a bunch of devs for both projects. There haven't been any major announcements about it yet, but the general goal is to make it nice for writing applications for Gnome in Rust, and to expand Gnome's efforts to use Rust themselves.

I'm not really a fan of gnome, but that would be great.

I had heard the opposite, that Vala is soon to be deprecated.

There's still KDE, which is chugging along nicely.

That's one of the two environments I was talking about (coupled with LXQt and potentially if it ever gets anywhere, Liri), but KDE gets far less dev mindshare for a variety of reasons, and it shows in the quality of releases and size of ecosystem.

>but it seems we're stuck with developing for two separate Linux environments

Why should we do that? Both Qt and Gtk+ looks nice in gnome, so you could choose more suitable for you.

Yes, Qt looks good in Gnome because Qt tries to use your system dialogs and icons , GTK does not respect the user enough and it will use it's own dialogs on all systems. This is not only about the look but also the fact that my native dialogs are customized( shortcuts ) and those are missing from GTK apps dialogs

Can you give some context for this comment? Does Unity do some trickery to stylize Gtk and Qt apps identically?

New Unity was to be built using Qt/QML. Qt plays ball with any environment and looks native everywhere (although perfect adherence to HIGs requires tweaks). Gtk looks native only in GNOME, thus, it is a horrible choice for portable GUIs (even throughout different Linux desktops).

Canonical getting behind Qt meant more effort was going towards making it a better development platform outside of C++, in fact early on they sponsored the development of Go QML bindings.

But now that's gone, and we're back to having no hope for that.

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