08 November, 2010

GHangtuxmm.


As I wrote in one of my previous posts, I have been working on the  conversion of GHangtux to GHangtuxmm, or in other words, on the conversion from C/GTK+ to C++/gtkmm.

For those of you who do not know about gtkmm (taken from the gtkmm project website): 
"gtkmm is the official C++ interface for the popular GUI library GTK+. Highlights include typesafe callbacks, and a comprehensive set of widgets that are easily extensible via inheritance. You can create user interfaces either in code or with the Glade User Interface designer, using Gtk::Builder. There's extensive documentation, including API reference and a tutorial. 

gtkmm is free software distributed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL).

gtkmm follows the official GNOME Platform Bindings release schedule. This guarantees API/ABI-stability and new releases on a predictable schedule, delivering C++ API for the underlying GTK+ and GNOME APIs as soon as possible." (from gtkmm project's website).

This has been fun again. Working on the project made me realize how laborious it can be to:
    - learn C++. What a monster!. This is all about experience, so my hope is that one day I will be the monster here, the C++ monster ;-).
    - convert an app that you have already developed into another language. The appropriate word here would actually be "rewrite" and not "convert", since you have to consider it as an entirely new project. Forget about what you did and focus on the new structure and libraries. This is a new project!
    - have a nice history in your repository... This takes practice, practice and more practice.

I am happy with the results so far although improvements are still being made. You can find and follow the project on GitHub where all comments and merge requests are welcome. Do not hesitate to do this.

Thanks for reading!