Clutter Toolkit 1.0.0 Is Released

[Remco]

Regarding Clutter being written in C, it's actually possible to do object-oriented design in C. Gtk+ is OO in C. It's a tiny bit more tedious than in C++, but it works. I'm working on a project now that would be much easier in C++ (and a language with functions as objects would be even easier than that), but it needs to run on an embedded system with limited CPU and memory bandwidth as quickly as possible, so C it is.

That system you're using for OO in C is the GObject system, right? You'll be pleased to know that Vala is an OO language that uses the GObject system to generate object-oriented C code. In Vala it is very easy to create a subclass of a class. If you compile it into C, you'll see the GObject code, which is very tedious to write manually.

[unix_epoch]

Regarding Clutter being written in C, it's actually possible to do object-oriented design in C. Gtk+ is OO in C. It's a tiny bit more tedious than in C++, but it works. I'm working on a project now that would be much easier in C++ (and a language with functions as objects would be even easier than that), but it needs to run on an embedded system with limited CPU and memory bandwidth as quickly as possible, so C it is.

IIRC, another reason C++ was avoided in the earlier Linux days was that there wasn't an LGPL-compatible C++ standard library.

[srg_13]

C is the perfect language for Clutter - as has been said, it's dead easy to bind to pretty much any language (there's already C++ and Javascript bindings, and there's probably one for C# too), as well as being fast and compact, and easily portable to other platforms.

As for QML, well, that probably has something similar to Clutter under the hood, and something like Clutter's Seed bindings (which uses Javascript) is probably more similar. You're comparing apples to oranges here.

[Remco]

If you want to combine any C library with a high-level OO garbage-collected language, you should take a look at Vala. It's a very new language that compiles into plain C code, so you can use C libraries with modern (inefficient ) programming practices.

[linuxjacques]

Clutter is also intended for low resource devices, many of which cannot support C++.

[puelocesar]

C really simplifies bindings for other languages like D, Objective C, etc. Getting alternative languages to link with C++ is complicated.

C++ people could use a C++ wrapper around the C stuff, just like Gtk+ has Gtkmm.

That's seems to be a good reason. Thanks!

[StringCheesian]

C really simplifies bindings for other languages like D, Objective C, etc. Getting alternative languages to link with C++ is complicated.

C++ people could use a C++ wrapper around the C stuff, just like Gtk+ has Gtkmm.

[mdias]

C is where it's at, clutter is meant for GTK/GNOME, Intel and Rad Hat got their back, who wants C++ anyway except KDE ppl?

I do. (damn 10 chars min post...)

[puelocesar]

who wants C++ anyway except KDE ppl?

Are you really serious about that question?

Besides that, I was not talking about C++, if you mind to open the link I sent, in Qml you can make an interface without any programming at all, just declaring components, and you can add behavior to it with simple scripting like you would do on HTML for example..

[hax0r]

C is where it's at, clutter is meant for GTK/GNOME, Intel and Rad Hat got their back, who wants C++ anyway except KDE ppl?