Subject: Re: Motif or GNOME? (semi-repost)
From: Bill (minorseventh@mail.earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Nov 05 2000 - 11:23:32 MST
>Here is a vote against Motif.
>
>A few years back, I worked on a project attempting to use C++,
>X-Windows/Motif, and SGI's GL -- on an SGI platform. It was a mess
>beyond description.
>
>First of all, Object Oriented Motif is a very difficult thing to do.
>The X event loop mechanism does not mix well with objects or with GL.
>
>How about considering Java ?
>
Thanks Daniel. Wow, funny you should mention that. Yesterday
somebody suggested java, so I spent several hours yesterday in Barnes
and Noble reading java books. In the end, I'm concerned about
performance. I'm doing complex analysis on maybe 10 gigs of data. The
data is in many files; the program will have to open a file, get a
byte, close it, open another, etc.; then do the computation (or do it
as I go). Java's garbage collection, on the fly checking, etc. make
it slower, apparently from what I read the hit is significant
especially for compute-intensive apps. However, I would consider java
anyway, if I had a good understanding of how relatively hard my
development will be using C++, X windows, Motif or Gnome, and OpenGL,
versus using java. As it stands I don't understand how much easier
java would be.
Another consideration is I may want to either use libraries or system
calls to existing programs to perform some computations. I don't know
if this is possible in java. Also, I don't know if java can interface
with fast graphics hardware like OpenGL does. If I use GNOME or KDE
instead of Motif, which I've heard are more object oriented, would
you still object to the OpenGL approach instead of java?
This is a bit of a big issue to me so I hope you reply again, sounds
like you have experience with what I'm heading towards.
Thanks.
Bill
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