Java, Mono, or C++?
Thoughts on the future of open source desktop development This was written March 16, 2004 and represents a personal opinion, though advice and comments from a number of others are reflected here. Hopefully it will start a discussion and become rapidly outdated in light of new insights and progress. Background In the Linux desktop world, there’s widespread sentiment that high-level language technologies such as garbage collection, sandboxed code, and so forth would be valuable to have and represent an improvement over C/C++. Several desktop projects are actively interested in this kind of technology: GNOME: many developers feel that this is the right direction Mozilla: to take full advantage of XUL, it has to support more than just JavaScript OpenOffice.org: has constantly flirted with Java, and is considering using Java throughout the codebase Evolution: has considered writing new code and features...