Erlang looks like a functional language, with single assignment, but Go certainly looks like a member of the C family. Erlang has certainly proven itself in serious production systems, but the syntax is different than other languages I’m used to. As for concurrency, I think in Erlang each process only has one “inbox” and you send messages to a PID, whereas in Go a goroutine can receive from multiple channels. Erlang has stuff for fault tolerance, Go is still exploring this space.

Scala is a fun looking language. I know that this isn’t about the concurrency model, but one thing with Scala is that it runs on top of the JVM, and has Java-flavored object orientation. This is great because you can re-use existing Java libraries, but it does mean you’re limited to what the JVM provides. For example, http://loadcode.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-vs-java.html says that a Java port of git performed badly because the JVM (1) doesn’t have unsigned ints and (2) can’t inline a byte[20] with the rest of an object. Go can do both.

In Go you can select to receive from multiple channels, which I don’t think you can do in Stackless (although I’d be happy to be proven wrong).

Twisted appears based around futures (they call them deferreds). In Go you can implement a future very simply with a goroutine and a channel, but that’s not the only thing you can do with goroutines and channels.

But I hear good things about all four things you mentioned.

Frankly, the Compiz switcher is pretty nice, so having SuperSwitcher in Compiz isn’t such a high priority for me. But on plain Metacity, SuperSwitcher rocks!

Personally, I like the live previews. I’d like it even better if I could get the icons and the previews.

No PPA yet. I haven’t really looked into it, but I just aim to publish a .deb, and don’t expect to issue many updates. On Karmic, installing is unfortunately a svn checkout and build from source. If you can wait a few months, then it’ll be easier to try on Lucid.

@Andrew,

For point 1, a 0.7 release might be worth doing. Still, I think it’ll be for Lucid and not Karmic.

For point 2, the biggest bug with live window thumbnails is that, at least with metacity, you need to keep all your windows on the same workspace. It’s not usable, to me, in my day-to-day work. I don’t know enough X to know how to fix that.

I´m glad to see Superswitcher project ain´t dead. Two little comments:

1. I think Superswitcher is a stable application but after SVN 33 and later revisions. With official 0.6 version I get many segmentation faults, specially when I kill anyother application and then try to use Superswitcher. In my opnion you should release an official 0.7 version from the latest code before make further changes to Superswitcher.

2. When I´m making my own wrapping applications, I usually open many windows/apps at the same time and it´s difficult to trace each application state. The live window thumbnail help me to organize them, without this feature I can´t even pick the right window. Didn´t see any bug or problem with your thumbnails implementation, please keep it…

Superswitcher is officially incorporated in one of the best Puppy Linux derivatives, Puppy 214X. Check it at:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42553

Greetings,
Andrew

When are you goign to release a new version of Superswitcher?. Did you know you have many features requests, this little app have many fans…

Salutes,
Andrew