Abstract nonsense

Months ago, I began working on a framework for addressbooks in ekiga.

My tools were the following : C and GObject. I wrote a big pile of code (as an external test program — it’s easier to work with), which did exactly what I wanted. The problem was that the ratio between serious code and stupid code was about 1/100. The GObject framework is nice — but it’s just awful to write. Damien soon confirmed that my 10 000 lines of code would be unmaintainable.

So I changed my tools to : C++ and sigc++. I wrote a much smaller pile of code (as an external test program — it’s easier to work with), which didn’t do exactly what I wanted, but good enough. And in less than 1000 lines of code. Quite readable (it’s C++ after all… don’t hit me Dodji), maintainable.

If I were to start anew now, I would certainly give vala a try — at worse it wouldn’t do the trick. A question fills my mind anytime I think about it : could it be used to rewrite parts of gtk+ more tersely?

PS: for those who don’t get the title of this post, this wikipedia article may help.